Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God: therefore the world knoweth us not, because it knew him not. Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is. And every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as he is pure.
—1 John 3:1-3The triune God delights in family planning. Unlike most modern human family planning, which is restrictive and limiting, God’s plans for His family are expansive and enlarging. Spiritual adoption—the wonderful teaching that every genuine Christian is an adopted child into God’s family—is a foundational and vital factor that God uses to fulfill His family planning.
The glorious doctrine of spiritual adoption is addressed several places in the New Testament. Romans 8:14-16 and Galatians 4:4-6 will be the most familiar to us, but adoption is also a frequent theme in 1 John. Particularly in 1 John 3:1-3, the apostle John lays before us the central and major New Testament themes of the fatherhood of God and the corresponding sonship of the believer. We don’t have to read far in the New Testament before we realize that this is of critical importance for the entirety of the Christian life. Where there is some degree of spiritual maturity, some realization of our sonship to the heavenly Father, this Father–son relationship will undergird our prayer, indeed, control our entire outlook on life. Much of what Christ taught us can be summarized in the precious doctrine of the salvific fatherhood of God. The revelation of the fatherhood of God to the believer is in a sense the climax of the Scriptures and one of the greatest benefits of salvation.
In this article, I aim to first, show the wonder of our glorious adoption; second, expound its Trinitarian foundation; third, and most extensively, consider particularly in the context of 1 John 3 how a right appropriation of this doctrine will transform all our relationships in life; and finally, conclude with adoption’s blessings and responsibilities.
The Wonder of Adoption
John begins the third chapter of 1 John with a call for believers to drop everything and consider the great doctrine of adoption. “Behold!” is John’s opening cry; “Look at this!” The apostle is so overwhelmed with the wonder of God’s adoption of believers that he is determined to direct everyone’s attention there. He asks us to gaze with him upon this wonder: “Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us that we should be called the sons of God!” (v. 1). It is as if John asks, do you know the wonder of this precious truth? Have you, by faith, comprehended this magnificent doctrine of adoption?
John’s sense of astonishment is more evident in the original Greek, which implies, “Behold, from what country or realm does such love as this come?” Matthew 8:27 uses similar phraseology to describe how astonished the disciples were when Jesus calmed the winds and the sea: “What manner of man is this (literally, ‘from what realm does this man come’) that even the winds and sea obey him!”
God’s adoption of believers is something unparalleled in this world, John is saying. This fatherly love has come upon us from another realm. The world does not understand such love, for it has never seen anything like it. It is beyond the realm of human experience.
John is astonished because God showed such amazing love even though we were outcasts, rebels, and enemies against Him and His kingdom. God “calls” us sons of God; that is, He brings us into His family, giving us the name, the privileges, and all the blessings of His own children. He invites us to know Him as Father and to dwell under His protection and care, and to come to Him with all our cares and needs. John is overwhelmed at the thought of being a full member of God’s family.
Have you ever considered what a stupendous wonder adoption is? Wilhelmus à Brakel put it this way: “From being a child of the devil to becoming a child of God, from being a child of wrath to becoming the object of God’s favor, from a child of condemnation to becoming an heir of all the promises and a possessor of all blessings, and to be exalted from the greatest misery to the highest felicity—this is something which exceeds all comprehension and all adoration.” [2]
Do you stand in awe at this wonderful love of the Father? Holy wonder and amazement is an important part of Christian experience. One of the devil’s tactics is to dull our sense of wonder, convincing us that we only feel such wonder in the initial stages of becoming a Christian. It is true that the sinner experiences a special sense of joy and wonder when he first comes to know Christ. We often refer to that time as one’s “first love.”
But John is writing here as an elderly man who has been a believer for more than sixty years. Yet his heart is still filled with amazement at being a son of God. He has never gotten over his initial sense of wonder at God’s fatherly love. He is still asking the question: “From what realm does this amazing love come that has broken in upon my soul and made me a child of God?”
Has the wonder of your salvation and adoption in Christ Jesus grasped your soul? Do you, too, cry out in amazement:
And can it be that I should gain
An interest in the Savior’s blood?
Died He for me, who caused His pain—
For me, who Him to death pursued?
Amazing love! How can it be,
That Thou, my God, shouldst die for me?
The psalters, hymns, and poems of our forefathers, especially in seasons of revival, were often filled with this glorious sense of wonder. Such wonder is the heart’s response to the saving truths of the gospel. It is evoked in us through the Spirit’s sanctifying grace as we meditate upon and embrace the glorious truths of sovereign grace (Ps. 104:34). Often God’s people experience too little wonder and awe over the gospel because their lives are so rushed that they do not stop long enough to wait upon the Spirit as they meditate on the glorious truths of the gospel.
We must meditate on Scripture and all that accrues to us in Christ Jesus—including our adoption—if we would have our hearts burn within us. That is what the pilgrims on the way to Emmaus said to each other after Christ had opened Scripture to them. “Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the scriptures?” (Luke 24:32) they asked in astonishment.
The way to a burning heart is through diligent meditation upon the Word of God. Scripture is the primary means of grace that God blesses by His Spirit. Is it any wonder that some believers have lost their sense of wonder and amazement over the gospel when they so seldom study the Bible prayerfully and meditatively?
The Trinitarian Foundation of Adoption
Believers are not sons of God by nature because we have lost the status and privileges of sonship in our tragic fall in Paradise. Adoption is only made possible when God’s gracious choice calls us into all the privileges and blessings of being His children. When we are born again, God delivers us from Satan’s slavery, and by His astounding grace, transfers us to the Father’s sonship. He calls us sons; we are adopted into His family.
Adoption in the time of John usually took place in adolescence or adulthood, not infancy. Under Roman law, adoption was a legal act by which a man chose someone outside of the family to be an heir to his inheritance. Likewise, believers become children of God through the gracious act of God the Father, who chooses them to be His heirs.
Sometimes adoptive parents announce receiving their son with the words, “chosen son.” God the Father, dear believer, set His heart upon you while you were a stranger and rebel, no member of His family. He called you, drew you to Himself, brought you into His family, constituted you to be His child, and now reserves for you the eternal inheritance of the kingdom of God.
The story is told of a king who finds a poor man’s child, takes him out of the gutter, and makes him a prince in the royal household with all its status and privilege. This gospel story is not fiction, however, for like that king, the Almighty God and Father has set His heart upon you, raised you up out of a horrible pit (Ps. 40:2), brought you into His home, and given to you all the privileges and blessings of being His child.
“Beloved, now are we the sons of God,” says John in verse 2. This is not merely legal language. We believers are, indeed, God’s chosen ones, as Ephesians 1:5-7 says. How astonishing that we as God’s adopted children share the same privileges that belong to God’s only-begotten Son! Have you grasped the incredible truth of what Christ prays in John 17:“that the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them”? This love is the essence of God’s fatherhood. It shows us how far God is willing to go to adopt us into His family.
Now we become children of God, i.e., God becomes our Father, by substitution or as John calls it, propitiation: “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10; cf. 1 John 2:2). Propitiation may seem like a strange term to us, but it is a vital term, for it contains the heart of the gospel.
Let me explain. We are not sons and daughters of God by nature. Many live under this false idea. They think that everyone is a child of God, coming from the same Father. It is true, of course, that we are all creatures of the one Creator, but the Bible nowhere tells us that we are all children of God by nature. Rather, it tells us that by nature we are children of wrath. We are the objects of God’s wrath, anger, and judgment by nature. As Thomas Watson writes, “We have enough in us to move God to correct us, but nothing to move him to adopt us, therefore exalt free grace, begin the work of angels here; bless him with your praises who hath blessed you in making you his sons and daughters.” [3]
God has only one Son by nature and that Son is the Lord Jesus Christ. Now God’s amazing love to sinners lies in the way He makes children of wrath to become the sons of His love. His only begotten Son is the Son of His love. The Father loves the Son, but in the astonishing substitution that God made in the atoning sacrifice of Christ, the wrath of God which was directed to us, was now poured upon His only begotten Son who thereby became the propitiation for our sins. The way by which we who were sons of wrath became the sons of love, is that the Son of God’s love and the Child of His glory became the Bearer of His wrath on the cross. All the judgment of God was poured out on Him in order that we, dear believers, might be made the children of God and sons of His love.
This is the astonishing biblical doctrine of substitution. Jesus Christ who deserved eternal heaven, bore my eternal hell as an ungodly sinner (but now by grace a believer), so that the gates of hell may be eternally closed for me and the gates of heaven be eternally thrown open. Oh, what a price Christ had to pay to accomplish this task! He had to hang in the naked flame of His Father’s wrath and be cast into outer darkness, crying out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”—all so that God could take us, for Christ’s sake, who are by nature estranged and rebellious sinners, and bring us into the family of God and constitute us as His children.
This is the only way to become a child of God—only through Christ being the propitiation, the sacrifice, the substitute, the atonement of God, for our sins. Only for Christ’s sake does God become the Father of His people. What country does this love come from—a love that would cause the holy God of all eternity to make this transaction on behalf of poor, hopeless, hell-worthy sinners like we are?
How great is the love the Father has lavished on us that we should be called children of God—we who deserve His judgment, dethroned Him from our lives, spurned His love, and defied His laws. We can never earn God’s love, yet He graciously lavishes love upon us in Christ. Here, surely, is the great assurance of the child of God, that he was not chosen for any good in him but that God the Father loved him when he was bound for hell. God loved the sinner who had no thought of God in his heart, and God adopted him to be His. Oh, what wonder is the assurance of the Father’s words: “I have loved thee with an everlasting love” (Jer. 31:3)!
All the members of the Trinity are involved in our adoption. Adoption is the gracious act of God the Father whereby He chooses us, calls us to Himself, and gives us the privileges and blessings of being His children. God the Son earned those blessings for us through His propitiatory death and sacrifice, by which we become children of God (1 John 4:10). And the Holy Spirit changes us from children of wrath, which we are by nature, into children of God by means of regeneration, or the new birth.
John refers to this new birth in 1 John 2:29, explaining the relationship between regeneration and adoption. If in adoption we would only receive the privilege and status of being God’s children, something would still be missing. The adopted child retains the nature of his natural parents, not the nature of the adoptive parents. God, in His amazing grace, not only gives us the status and privileges of being His children by adoption, but He also gives us the nature of God, which abides within us by Spirit-worked regeneration. The Holy Spirit implants God’s nature within us. As 1 John 3:9 says, “Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin (i.e., no one born of God goes on committing sin); for his seed remaineth in him (i.e., for God’s nature abides in him).”
Are you a child of God? Do you know what it means to have a new nature that cries out for the living God and lives under His fatherly love, fellowship, and protection? Have you been transferred from Satan’s slavery to the Father’s sonship by God’s astounding grace?
Transformed Relationships Resulting from Adoption
Adoption brings blessings into every part of a believer’s life. It affects his relationships to God, to the world, to his future, to himself, and to brothers and sisters in God’s family. The biblical doctrine of adoption is central to a proper understanding of every major area of the Christian’s life. All relationships are put into proper context only when believers are conscious of their sonship to the Father.
Christ Himself is the best proof of this truth. Jesus’ consciousness of His unique sonship with the Father controlled all of Christ’s living and thinking. As Jesus says in John 5:30, “I seek not mine own will, but the will of my Father which hath sent me,” and in John 10:30, “I and my Father are one.” “If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not,” Jesus says in John 10:37, and “As my Father hath sent me, even so send I you” (John 20:21). More than thirty times in the Gospel of John Jesus speaks of “my Father.”
Though the relationship of God the Father and God the Son is an obvious truth in the gospels, what is not so obvious is how Jesus urges His disciples to let their thoughts and lives be controlled by the conviction that God is now their Father and they are His children. Jesus repeatedly urges kinship with the Father as the foundation of Christian discipleship. He tells His disciples that they are to be examples of trusting their Father, asking them, “Why are you anxious about what you should eat or drink or about your future—your Father knows that you have need of all these things.” Because their whole lives must be directed to do their Father’s glory and obey His will, Jesus teaches His disciples to pray: “Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be Thy Name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” The child of God is to live his whole life in relation to his Father, remembering that the Father has promised each child His kingdom.
Practically speaking, the significance of adoption has great implications. It transforms the following:
1. Our relationship to God. When the gospel breaks in upon us, we are led by the Spirit to discover the amazing truth that God is our Father in Christ Jesus. The heartbeat of daily Christian experience is to live in fellowship with the Father and the Son. A true Christian lives under God’s fatherly love, wisdom, care, guidance, and discipline.
People are hungry for security today. They look for it in all kinds of places, but they often go about it the wrong way. The only place in the universe where true security can be found is in the household of the heavenly Father, who is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. There is no security outside of fellowship with God the Father through the Lord Jesus Christ.
So many people are discovering that the things that once gave them security are now falling apart. They are facing failure in business, jobs, or relationships with family members and friends. They are beset with financial insolvency, terrorism, and war. So much in life is uncertain; so much is crumbling away. The most powerful company on earth may fold in the next recession. We learn that nothing in life is secure except God. He alone does not change (Mal. 3:6).
Are you looking for security in the fatherhood of God? Are you daily being led deeper into His faithfulness as your Father? Jesus taught His disciples this truth in many ways. For example, He urged His followers to think about God’s fatherly love by comparing it to the love of a human father. He said in Matthew 7:11, “If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?”
The comparison is between the fatherhood of earthly fathers, who are evil (i.e., they have fallen natures and show flaws and failures and sins) and the fatherhood of God, who is steadfast in love that never falters or changes, even when we sin. God’s fatherhood is flawless. I will show you a love, says Jesus, which is expansive and glorious beyond imagination. It is the love of your Father in heaven.
I don’t know what your experience of human fatherhood has been. Some of us have had little relationship with our earthly fathers; some have had good experiences, and others have had disappointing, even bitter, experiences. Everything that fails in human fatherhood is corrected in God’s fatherhood. Everything good we experience in human fatherhood is a mere shadow of the full and perfect fatherhood of God.
If you are a father, you know how your heart sometimes aches and cries out for your children in love. Imagine multiplying that love by infinity. Then realize how even that falls short of the love of God for His people. Do you succumb to the embrace of your heavenly Father? Oh that you would allow yourself to partake of His unspeakable fatherly love!
To increase His people’s appreciation for God’s fatherhood, Jesus urges His people to think of His own relationship to God the Father. We need to ponder the wonder of this especially in the context of daily afflictions, remembering that Jesus felt His Father’s love in the afflictions He underwent. When you are under God’s discipline and He is permitting trials to fall upon you, remember that these difficulties are evidence of your Father’s love (Heb. 12:5-11). God has a plan, a purpose, a vision for His people as a loving Father that embraces every affliction and heartache.
As parents, we dream of what our children might become when they grow up. Likewise, God also has a vision for His children. He knows precisely what He wants them to be. He knows how He will mold and train them according to His plan, and inevitably, that involves discipline because God will not permit His believers to be less than what He intends them to be. He uses His fatherly discipline for their welfare (Lam. 3:31-33). If we are born-again believers, we must ask for wisdom to see everything in our life as a blessing from God our Father, who adopts us as His own.
2. Our relationship to the world. The believer’s adoption by God the Father also affects his relationship to the world. First John 3:1b tells us that this relationship is a troubled one: “Therefore the world knoweth us not, because it knew him not.” On the one hand, the believer shares with Jesus the unspeakable love of the Father, but on the other hand, he shares with Jesus the hostility, estrangement, and even hatred of the world. The reason the world does not know the children of God is because it does not know Jesus.
The world is baffled by what happens to God’s people for it cannot understand why they love what they love, and hate what they hate. This reaction of the world is evidence of the believer’s adoption into God’s family, for the world did not know Jesus either; He came unto His own and His own received Him not. He was in the world, which was created by Him, but the world knew Him not. The world did not recognize Him as the Son of God. Ultimately, it crucified Him.
When a sinner is born again and brought into God’s family, he comes to know the great blessings of deliverance in Christ. But the believer also discovers that worldly people no longer understand him. For example, when God converted me at age fourteen, I had to break some of my closest friendships to remain faithful to God. One friend was puzzled. “I thought I knew you, but I do not know what has happened to you,” he said. “I cannot understand you. It is as if we are living in two different worlds.”
Believers and unbelievers do live in different worlds, in different kingdoms, in different families. That cannot help but bring consequences. But adoption into God’s family means that we must be willing for Christ’s sake to walk in the world even if we are misunderstood, unwanted, despised, even hated, all the while giving no unnecessary offense to the world.
3. Our relationship to the future. John goes on to say, “Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). The prospects for God’s adopted family are great, for His children will receive a glorious inheritance. They cannot even imagine the extent of that inheritance.
Here in this world, we are God’s children, even though the world does not understand us. But we have something much greater in store for us—the infinite glory that God the Father is laying up for us in Christ Jesus. God’s child is like a poor peasant who has been taken out of the mire and raised to the position of prince of the realm. The adopted prince lives in the palace, has free access to the king, and enjoys the king’s favor, love, and protection. The prince tells the king he cannot comprehend the greatness of the king’s love. It is unspeakably great to him. The king responds: “You have not begun to see the extent of it. Your inheritance is still coming to you.”
If our present privileges as God’s adopted children are so great that the world cannot grasp them, our future prospects are so glorious that even we cannot grasp them. As 1 Corinthians 2:9 says, “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.” Because God is our Father and we are His adopted children, we have a full inheritance awaiting us. The best is yet to be. Today we experience great blessings, despite our infirmities and sins, but one day we shall be in glory, free from sin and in perfect communion with God. Our heavenly Father keeps the best surprises for His children until the end, when He shall turn all their sorrow into joy.
Likewise, today we look at Christ by faith. Though what we see is shadowy and dim, we are being changed from glory to glory by the Spirit of the Lord (2 Cor. 3:18). One day all shadows will be removed. We will see Christ as He is, in all His glory.
Moreover, God is shaping us to share in the glories of our Lord Jesus Christ. As 1 John 3:2 says, “When he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.” God is changing us now, but then we shall be so changed that we will fully bear His image without spot or wrinkle. Paul tells us in Romans 8:22-23 that the whole creation waits for the day when the inheritance of the children of God will be given to them. What a future!
4. Our relationship to ourselves. The children of the heavenly Father know His will and purpose for them. Every adopted child of God also knows that holiness is an important part of God’s purpose for his happiness in God’s family. As 1 John 3:3 says, “And every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as he is pure.”
In holiness, the child of God identifies himself with His Father’s purposes. Sometimes children resent their father’s purposes, but the true adopted son of God identifies with His Father’s purpose for him. He does not try to find himself apart from his Father in heaven, but in his Father’s will. Because seeking God’s purposes for the believer’s life is inseparable from the pursuit of holiness, the believer gives himself to the purpose that his Father has for him.
John tells us, “Every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself” (3:3). So we are to purify ourselves daily. As Colossians 3 tells us, holiness means putting off everything that is dishonoring to our Father, who has loved us, and the Savior, who has died to save us. It means putting on “mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, and longsuffering” (3:12). Purifying ourselves involves “the whole man,” says John Cotton, including what we do with our minds, affections, will, thoughts, tongue, eyes, hands, disappointments, injuries, and enemies. [4] Purifying ourselves involves loving all that the Father loves and hating all that the Father hates. From the moment of conversion to the time we take our final breath, we have one pursuit: to purify ourselves before our Father in order to be more like Christ.
The Greek word for purify refers to undivided allegiance, or having one’s eyes on one thing. It implies wholeness and singleness of purpose. It means having undivided motives in our living and our service, being wholly dedicated to living to glorify Jesus Christ. The way that Christians become known as sons of God is that they have a new goal for themselves, a new relationship toward themselves. By God’s grace, they purify themselves even as Christ is pure.
5. Our relationship to the family of God. If we rightly understand that we are adopted into God’s family (note the usage of the plural throughout 1 John 3:1-2), our attitude toward our brothers and sisters in the family will be affected (3:14-18). We have not been adopted to live apart from that family but to live within that network of relationships. God’s purpose in adopting children is to create a family, in which God reflects His gracious purpose that will one day be fulfilled in heaven. He wants the love that exists between the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit to be extended through the love between brothers and sisters in Christ.
The communion of saints is so essential to the gospel. That is why it is so grievous when people in the church do not show love to one another. If we profess a Savior that laid down His life for us and we are part of His family, we ought to be willing to lay down our lives for other members of the family. We should uphold them, love them, and sacrifice for them. We should not grieve each other, wound each other, or gossip about each other. The way we behave toward other Christians proves whether or not we are adopted children of God (3:14-15).
If we show little love to other children of God, we prove that we have tasted little of God’s love in our life, for those who have experienced much love from Him cannot help but love others. Those who have not tasted the love of God will not love the brethren.
Privileges and Responsibilities
What about you? Have you become a child of God through the triune God’s glorious adoption of you into His family? Do you live under God’s fatherly grace of love, fellowship, and protection? Do you know experientially the amazing transition from slavery to sonship so ably expressed by a poet?
“Abba, Father,” we approach Thee
In our Saviour’s precious name;
We, Thy children, here assembling,
Now the promised blessing claim.
From our guilt His blood has washed us,
’Tis through Him our souls draw nigh;
And Thy Spirit too has taught us
“Abba, Father,” thus to cry.
Once as prodigals we wander’d
In our folly far from Thee;
But Thy grace, o’er sin abounding,
Rescued us from misery:
Clothed in garments of salvation,
At Thy table is our place;
We rejoice, and Thou rejoicest,
In the riches of Thy grace.
Thou the prodigal hast pardon’d,
“Kiss’d us” with a Father’s love;
“Kill’d the fatted calf,” and call’d us
E’er to dwell with Thee above.
“It is meet,” we hear Thee saying,
“We should merry be and glad;
I have found my once lost children,
Now they live who once were dead.”
“Abba, Father!” we adore Thee,
While the hosts in heaven above
E’en in us now learn the wonders
Of Thy wisdom, grace, and love.
Soon before Thy throne assembled,
All Thy children shall proclaim
Abba’s love as shown in Jesus,
And how full is Abba’s name! [5]
Pray that God will empower us to understand the transforming blessings and implications of adoption in relation to the triune God, the world, our future, ourselves, and the family of God. Then we will understand better the greater privileges and benefits of adoption. Privileges like these:
- Our Father cuts us off from the family to which we naturally belong in Adam as children of wrath and of the devil, and ingrafts us into His own family to make us members of the covenant family of God. “Adoption translates us out of a miserable estate, into a happy estate,” writes Thomas Cole. “God is in covenant with us, and we in him.” [6]
- Our Father gives us freedom to call on Him by His Father-name and gives us a new name, which serves as our guarantee of admission to the house of God as sons and daughters of God (Rev. 2:17; 3:12).
- Our Father gifts us with the Spirit of adoption. Believers are, by grace, partakers of the Holy Spirit. This Spirit, Jeremiah Burroughs tells us, enlightens our mind, sanctifies our heart, makes God’s wisdom and will known to us, guides us to eternal life, yes, works the entire work of salvation in us and seals it to us unto the day of redemption (Eph. 4:30). [7]
- Our Father grants us likeness to Himself and His Son. The Father imparts to His children a filial heart and disposition that resemble His own. Roger Drake writes, “All God’s adopted children bear their Father’s image, as Gideon’s brethren did his (Judg. 8:18). They are like God, in holiness [and] in dignity” (Matt. 5:44-45; Rom. 8:29; Heb. 2:7; 1 John 3:2-3). [8]
- Our Father especially strengthens our faith through His gifts of promises and prayer. “If we are adopted,” writes Thomas Watson, “then we have an interest in all the promises: the promises are children’s bread.” They are like a garden, Watson goes on to say, in which some herb is found to cure every ailment. [9]
- Our Father corrects and chastens us for our sanctification. “He chasteneth and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth” (Heb. 12:6). All chastisement involves discipline that comes from our Father’s hand and works together for our best welfare (2 Sam. 7:14; Ps. 89:32-33; Rom. 8:28, 36-37; 2 Cor. 12:7). Our sufferings are “for our education and instruction in his family,” writes John Owen. [10]
- Our Father comforts us with His love and pity, and moves us to rejoice in intimate communion with Him and His Son (Rom. 5:5). He does that in several ways, as Samuel Willard notes: “He applies the precious promises to their souls, he gives them cordials of comfort, communicates unto them the sips and foretastes of glory, [and] fills them with inward joys and refreshings.” [11]
- Our Father offers us spiritual, Christian liberty as His sons and daughters (John 8:36). This liberty releases us from bondage (Gal. 4:7). It delivers us from the slavish subjection, the servile pedagogy, the condemning power, the intolerable yoke, and the thundering curses of the law as a covenant of works (Gal. 3:13), though not from the law’s regulating power. [12]
- Our Father preserves us and keeps us from falling (Ps. 91:11-12; 1 Pet. 1:5). He restores us from every backsliding way, recovering and humbling us, always preventing our hypocrisy.13 Samuel Willard says, “God’s sons in this life are like little Children, always tripping, and stumbling, and falling, and so weak that they could never get up again but for him: but by reasons of his hand that is upon them, his everlasting Arm that is under them.” [14]
- Our Father provides everything that we need as His children, both physically and spiritually (Ps. 34:10; Matt. 6:31-33), and will protect us from all harm. He will defend us from our enemies—Satan, the world, and our own flesh—and right our wronged cause. He will assist and strengthen us, always lending us a helping hand to carry us through every difficulty and temptation (2 Tim. 4:17). We may safely leave everything in His fatherly hands, knowing that He will never leave us nor forsake us (Heb. 13:5-6).
- Show childlike reverence and love for your Father in everything. Reflect habitually upon your Father’s great glory and majesty. Stand in awe of Him; render Him praise and thanksgiving in all things. Remember, your holy Father sees everything. Children sometimes commit dreadful acts in the absence of their parents, but your Father is never absent.
- Submit to your Father in every providence. When He visits you with the rod, don’t resist or murmur. Don’t immediately respond by saying, “‘I am not a child of God, God is not my Father, God deals harshly with me; if He were my Father, He would have compassion on me; He would then deliver me from this grievous and especially this sinful cross—to speak thus does not befit the nature of an upright child,” writes Brakel. Rather, “it is fitting for a child to be quiet, to humbly submit, and to say, ‘I will bear the indignation of the LORD, because I have sinned against him’” (Mic. 7:9). [15]
- Obey and imitate your Father, and love His image-bearers. Strive to be like Him, to be holy as He is holy, to be loving as He is loving. We are to be “imitators of God” (Eph. 5:1) to show that we bear the family likeness.
- Rejoice in being in your Father’s presence. Delight in communing with Him. Burgess writes, “A son delights to have letters from his Father, to have discourse about him, especially to enjoy his presence.” [16] Resist every hindrance, therefore, that keeps you from relishing your Father’s adopting grace.
In heaven, this joy will be full; our adoption will then be perfected (Rom. 8:23). Then we will enter into the Father’s “presence and palace,” where we will be “everlastingly enjoying, delighting, and praising God.” [17] Let us wait and long for that, as children who eagerly anticipate our full inheritance, where the triune God shall be our all in all. [18]
Meanwhile, let us seek grace to live as children of God in the midst of this fallen world. Then we too will often confess with the apostle John, “Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God: therefore the world knoweth us not, because it knew him not. Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is. And every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as he is pure” (1 John 3:1-3).
Notes
- Portions of this article are adapted from my The Epistles of John (Darlington, U.K.: Evangelical Press, 2006), 111-20, and my Heirs with Christ: The Puritans on Adoption (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2008), 75-102. Reprinted with permission from Reformed Theological Journal 26 (Nov. 2010):94-108.
- Wilhelmus à Brakel, The Christian’s Reasonable Service, trans. Bartel Elshout, ed. Joel R. Beeke (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 1999), 2:419.
- Thomas Watson, A Body of Practical Divinity (London: A. Fullarton, 1845), 160.
- John Cotton, An Exposition of First John (reprint, Evansville, Ind.: Sovereign Grace Publishers, 1962), 331.
- James G. Deck, “Abba, Father, we approach Thee,” in The Believers’ Hymn Book (Glasgow: Pickering & Inglis, [1900]), 1.
- Thomas Cole, A Discourse of Christian Religion, in Sundry Points...Christ the Foundation of our Adoption, from Gal. 4. 5 (London: for Will. Marshall, 1698), 351.
- Jeremiah Burroughs, The Saints’ Happiness, Delivered in Divers Lectures on the Beatitudes (reprint, Beaver Falls, Penn.: Soli Deo Gloria, 1988), 196.
- Roger Drake, “The Believer’s Dignity and Duty Laid Open, in the High Birth wherewith he is Privileged, and the Honourable Employment to which he is Called,” in Puritan Sermons 1659-1689: Being the Morning Exercises at Cripplegate, St. Giles in the Fields, and in Southwark by Seventy-five Ministers of the Gospel in or near London (reprint, Wheaton, Ill.: Richard Owen Roberts, 1981), 5:333.
- Watson, A Body of Practical Divinity, 160.
- John Owen, The Works of John Owen, ed. William H. Goold (reprint, London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1966), 16:257.
- Samuel Willard, The Child’s Portion (Boston: Samuel Green, 1684), 22.
- The Complete Works of the Late Rev. Thomas Boston, Ettrick, ed. Samuel M’Millan (reprint, Wheaton, Ill.: Richard Owen Roberts, 1980), 1:625; Cole, Christ the Foundation of our Adoption, 352-53.
- Thomas Ridgley, Commentary on the Larger Catechism (reprint, Edmonton: Still Waters Revival Books, 1993), 2:136.
- Willard, The Child’s Portion, 17.
- Brakel, Christian’s Reasonable Service, 2:437.
- Anthony Burgess, Spiritual Refining: or A Treatise of Grace and Assurance (London: A Miller for Thomas Underhill, 1652), 240.
- Thomas Manton, The Complete Works of Thomas Manton, D.D. (London: James Nisbet, 1870), 12:125.
- Drake, Puritan Sermons, 5:342; cf. Willard, The Child’s Portion, 71.
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