Session 3: Orphan to Son

Opening and Prayer

There’s more love that I can get, and that is so cool. We’re going to start off this afternoon with the orphan to son talk. Son or daughter, we’re all included. Jonathan Boettcher, would you like to come up and get us started?

I’d like that. I could start off with prayer. Thank you, Father, for your presence here. Thank you for your love for each one of us. Thank you that you reveal things in your heart of love, Lord, and it’s always just to bring us healing. It’s never to bring shame. So, Father, through this afternoon, would you put your gaze on the things that you want to heal in our hearts. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Orphans Achieve, Sons Receive

We’re going to be talking about the heart of an orphan versus the heart of a son or a daughter. It’s just easier to say “son” all the time, but please know that daughters are 100% included in that statement.

There are four words I’ve been thinking about a fair bit recently. It’s a quote from Dale Mast: orphans achieve, sons receive. If that’s the only thing you take from my talk, that’s enough, because everything else falls under that umbrella.

Before we get started, I want to deal with a terminology question. There’s a lot of talk about an “orphan spirit.” Your spirit is orphaned, but in Christian circles, when you talk about spirits, you have a spirit of fear and a spirit of this and that, so there’s a connotation that the orphan issue might be a demonic problem. If it is a demonic problem, then we have to go into warfare, and warfare is the answer of the orphan. The problem of an orphan is a wounded heart. It’s not baggage from elsewhere. It’s a wound in the heart that needs healing through love. So this is not a demon we cast out. If you hear that term, just shift it over to “an orphaned heart.” As we reconnect our hearts to the Father, that brings the healing.

Isaac and Ishmael

Let’s look at Isaac and Ishmael. Isaac is a type of Christ, a type of son. Ishmael is our example of the orphan. If you remember the story, Sarah was barren, and they were promised a son. Then God didn’t deliver, and time went on. Abraham and Sarah said, “I have an idea. Let’s take things into our own hands and accomplish God’s word for ourselves.” Remember, orphans achieve and sons receive. So Abraham reached out with his hand, and with Hagar he produced Ishmael. Everything looked fine for a while, until Isaac came along.

You see, an orphan can sneak under the radar for a long time. Then when the heart gets squeezed, the orphan pops out, and now we have a problem. Ishmael was not a problem until Isaac came along and threatened his identity. At that point you get enmity between Ishmael and Isaac, and Ishmael starts mocking Isaac. He knew intuitively that Isaac had a better claim to Abraham’s inheritance than he did. Isaac was the legitimate son, and Ishmael was illegitimate. The orphan’s response is to lash out.

Sarah said, “We need to send them away. I can’t have my son around us.” Abraham agreed, so they sent Ishmael away. Abraham essentially disowned him and sent him off into the wilderness. We read there that Hagar, Ishmael’s mom, puts him under a tree and turns her back, because she can’t bear to see her son die in the wilderness. So Ishmael has been abandoned and disowned by his father, and now his mother is also turning her back. He had physical parents. His parents were alive. Yet can you see how his heart was completely orphaned? Both of his parents had disowned him for their own selfish reasons.

God says of him that his hand will be against every man, and that he will be a wild donkey of a man. That typifies the heart of the orphan: it’s always struggling, always at enmity with sonship, always striving.

In Galatians 4 it says, “For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a bondwoman, the other by a freewoman. But the son of the bondwoman was born according to the flesh, and the son of the freewoman through promise. Now we, brethren, as Isaac was, are children of promise.”

A Chart for Your Own Heart

We’re going to go through a chart. There’s a lot of information on it, and you could do whole sermons on each of these points. We’re not going to do that. This is an overview, and it’s in a similar vein to what we went through this morning looking at father types. This is more about identifying the characteristics of the orphan in our own hearts.

I want to caution you that this chart is not a scorecard. It might be tempting to go through it and say, “I’m over here on the left, and I’m over there on the right,” checking off all the boxes. That’s an orphan behavior, trying to check all the boxes. I also want to say that this chart is not a weapon. Don’t take this home and say to your spouse or your friends, “You’re acting like an orphan today.” It won’t go over very well, and that is also an attribute of an orphan. Use it purely for your own diagnosis, in partnership with the Holy Spirit. Let him speak to you through it.

I found it really helpful in my own life, because sometimes you just don’t know where behaviors come from or why you struggle with things. I hear a lot of conversations about the root of this problem or the root of that problem. For me, everything comes down to identity. So many different things are simply solved by reuniting a heart with the Father.

We’re all orphans. My parents are here in this room, and I still self-identify as an orphan. You could have the best parents in the world, and mine were good parents. Thank you. But you’ve heard it said that we’re all created with a God-shaped hole, and that’s true. Your parents, even if they were the best in the world, are like those little taster spoons of ice cream. It isn’t enough. You’re created with a hole inside that needs God, and God is the ice cream factory. You can have the best parents in the world, and they’re still only a taste tester of what you were designed to receive. So we’re all deficient in the parenting we’ve received.

Image of God, Theology, and Approval

Here is the chart. The first line is the image of God: seeing God as a master versus a loving Father. There’s a lot of emphasis in Christianity on serving, and this can be deeply affected by your image of God.

Next is independent, self-reliant. Some people just can’t accept help. That comes from not being able to depend on God, not receiving. There’s a wound inside that says, “I have to do it on my own.” The heart of the son says, “I acknowledge my need. I acknowledge that maybe I’m not even the best at this particular thing and that someone else could help me,” and there is no threat in receiving help.

Then theology. The heart of the orphan lives by the love of law. Who likes being right? It’s nice to be right, and that’s not a bad thing. But when you need to be right, that’s a problem, because then you start trampling other people in your need to be right. I used to go to a small church with a lot of emphasis on discernment ministry, which is a loosely veiled way of pointing out holes in other people’s theology. During that time I read things that painted John Arnott in a bad light. Then one day I met him, and it didn’t feel like the same thing at all. I sensed the Spirit on him. I sensed the humility in him, and I thought, “Wait a second, where was that coming from?” In their attempt to be right, people will pick apart any little thing and trample the person, and they don’t care.

Sons, by contrast, evaluate things by the law of love. I used to spend a lot of time looking at end-times things and prophecy and all the rest of it. At one point God showed me that this was not leading me to a good place. It was producing fear. He changed my whole thinking, so that now my lens is love. If you have a theology that does not promote love or communicate well through love, it’s not good theology. Everything needs to be submitted to love. Sons are willing to say, “I’m willing to be wrong if it’s not according to love. I choose love instead of my own belief of how things are supposed to go.”

Next is the need for approval, striving for the acceptance of man. Who has ever felt the need for approval? Probably most people in the room. One thing I used to really struggle with was, “What does God want me to do with my life?” Whenever I knew where he was pointing me, I was all in and ready to go down that path. But whenever there was ambiguity, I was looking for his approval. I wanted to know that I was doing the thing he had told me to do. He was saying, “I don’t want you to do that. I want you to take a totally different approach.” Sons are totally accepted in God’s love and justified by grace, so you’re free to just be. He was saying, “I’m not looking for your performance.”

Motives for Service and Purity

Motive for service is related to that. The orphan has a need for personal achievement, trying to impress God and others, or has no motivation to serve at all. Here’s a useful way to see it: orphans do to get identity. Sons receive identity and then do. Orphans are always working from below, trying to get. Sons say, “This has been given to me. I receive it. Okay, Father, let’s go.” It’s a totally different way of seeing it. An orphan and a son might be sitting at the back serving in exactly the same capacity, worshiping on stage or preaching or working in the same job, doing exactly the same things, but from a different place inside. One is trying to achieve identity. The other is living from received identity.

Then the motive behind Christian disciplines. I recently heard a story about a man who, when he was three years old, was told by his Sunday school teacher about hell, and that if he didn’t become a Christian he was going to hell. He had nightmares of being in hell at three years old. After a couple of nights he went to his mom, and she said, “Oh, you want to be a Christian, this is so great,” and she prayed with him, and his nightmares went away. She thought, “My son’s a Christian.” But he went through his entire Christian life torn up, because he was being told to get close to the One he knew was going to send him to hell if he didn’t perform. You can see how that causes problems inside. Your motive behind the disciplines becomes, “If I don’t read my Bible, if I don’t go to church, if I don’t sing on the worship team, I’m going to be smacked eternally,” and then you’re constantly stuck. Sons don’t struggle with that. They say, “I serve because of who I am and what I’ve received.”

Then the motive for purity. The orphan believes, “You must be holy to have God’s favor,” which increases the sense of shame and guilt. This is when you believe that your behavior leads you to holiness. It’s the same pattern. On the orphan side I think, “My behavior makes me holy or not.” But if we come into sonship and understand that in our union with Christ we have been made holy and made righteous, then out of that I want to live righteously. It’s a totally different way of living. The orphan is trying to achieve, and the son is living from what he has already received. This is not something we look forward to. It has been given to us.

Comparison, Comfort, and Competition

Self-image. Comparing yourself to someone else: who has ever done that? Maybe it’s just me. I’ve had a lot of it. Sometimes you might not act it out, and it’s all just in here. That’s where the power of this is so useful, because we don’t have to be trying to squash thoughts all the time. When those things get healed in our hearts, God actually shifts our thinking to the sonship way of seeing. So even if it’s not outwardly acted out, God has more freedom. When I noticed this in myself, my response was, “God, would you father me in this area of comparison?” He did. He brought me to the point where, when I started comparing myself with somebody else, I started blessing them instead. I would say, “God, would you increase what they’re doing? Would you make them even better at it? Would you bless them?”

Next is the source of comfort: seeking comfort in counterfeit affections, addictions, compulsions, escapism, busyness, and hyper-religious activity. Do you seek comfort through non-relational distractions? A phone, a screen, any form of screen is non-relational. You might say, “Oh, it’s social media,” but that isn’t relational. It could be that you always need music on in the background or the TV on, some kind of distraction. I think it was Pascal, a couple hundred years ago, who said that all of man’s problems stem from an inability to be alone with himself in a room. When we look for distraction, we can’t just be in God’s presence, at rest and at peace, without a phone, maybe even without your Bible. I’ve tried that: just you and him. Do the things you turn to for comfort cause you to connect or to disconnect? The heart of sonship connects for comfort. That’s what we’re designed for as little children. If a child is in need, what happens? The child connects for comfort.

Then relationships: competition, rivalry, and jealousy toward others’ success and position. How many of you have experienced a friend getting something you wanted for yourself? God was working in my heart, and it was really bothering me that I was jealous of other people. I knew he was working on it. Then one day a friend got a promotion I wanted. I forget exactly what it was, but it was something I wanted, and to my great delight I responded with joy for him. I was so much happier that this was my response inside. I said, “God, you did something in my heart.” He changes your defaults.

Next is how we handle other people’s faults. I preached a week or two ago on the Pharisee and the tax collector (Luke 18). The Pharisee basically throws the tax collector under the bus. He says, “This terrible person, clearly I’m so much better than him,” and he steps on his head to try to get a little closer to God. Orphans do this to other people so that they can feel a little better about themselves. Sons are willing to promote others, knowing it’s not to their own detriment.

Authority, Correction, and Love

Then the view of authority. The orphan sees authority as a source of pain, is distrustful toward it, and lacks a heart attitude of submission. When you’re wounded by an authority figure, you close your heart. When you close your heart, you also close yourself to receiving any of the good things God intends through that authority structure. Authority is meant for our blessing. That’s God’s intent. Man twists things, but God has good things he wants to flow to you, and when we close our hearts off, we close them to those good things as well.

Next is the view of admonition. Have you ever seen someone who, as soon as they start getting corrected, throws out the hand grenade? “What’s that over there? Don’t look at me. It’s somebody else’s fault.” It’s constant deflection. They absolutely cannot handle the possibility that they might be at fault, because correction is always interpreted as shame. A son says, “Oh, maybe I could have done that better.” A son is willing to receive correction, to improve, to grow, and to mature. This is how we grow as sons. Pruning is not fun. It sucks to be pruned. But pruning is not punishment. The Father’s design in pruning is so that you can bear much fruit, so that you can be stronger. That’s the Father’s heart toward us: “We need to work on that a little bit, but you can’t even imagine what’s going to happen on the other side of this pruning.” An orphan says, “Nope, none of that, pruning hurts,” and so orphans get stuck for a long time.

Then the expression of love. For the orphan it is guarded and conditional, based on others’ performance, as you seek to get your own needs met: you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. This can be carried into every relationship, and if the other person fails you in some way, then, oh well. A son, on the other hand, is open, patient, and affectionate, laying down his life and his agendas for other people, not hoping to get something in return. It’s a free gift. Think of Jesus. What did Jesus get out of serving all those people? He wasn’t getting a quid pro quo. He said, “This is a free gift. You can’t pay me back.”

Then the sense of God’s presence, which for the orphan is conditional and distant. You may feel you need to have all your ducks in a row. Jonathan gave a great example of this this morning: coming in the door, stopping at the back, cleaning up those shoes, doing some repenting, making sure the heart posture is right, going a little further. When you’re in that zone, you can’t just walk in the back and get hit by God’s presence. To an orphan that doesn’t compute. You need to go through all the steps and pay the penance. You might find yourself developing all kinds of Christian habits, which are good things, but if you approach them from the wrong side, they don’t give you the kind of life you’re looking for. They don’t yield the fruit you’re looking for.

The son experiences God as close and intimate. You’re no longer hearing stories about how other people have experienced God, such as “I heard this story about this guy.” Now it’s me. I was the one he loved. I was the one who got the hug. I was the one he spoke to. There’s a personal experience, a closeness, an intimacy where you know your Father. When you have that, nobody can take it from you. They can argue with ideas and theologies and whatever, but nobody can take it from you when you’ve felt it in your heart.

Bondage, Liberty, and Vision

Bondage versus liberty ties into feeling like a servant or a slave. I went through a season where I felt very trapped in my business and my work life. All the doors seemed closed, and there was a lid on the roof and everything else. I was kind of bitter at God about it, and it took me a long time to finally start asking, because I was seeing it as God trapping me there. In the last couple of years I finally said, “Father, I think maybe you saw that a little differently than I did. Would you mind showing me how you saw it? I’m starting to see that you probably didn’t intend it that way.” He completely reframed that season for me. He said, “I used that season to prepare you to receive the answer to your deepest prayer.” What? In sonship you can say, “Father, I don’t understand this, but in relationship, can you help me to understand, because I want to know your heart? I want to grow. I want to see things as you do.” That’s the heart of the son. The heart of the orphan says, “Why do you keep trapping me?” You can see the difference.

Last is vision: spiritual ambition, the desire for some spiritual achievement or distinction and the willingness to strive for it, the desire to be seen and counted among the mature. Who doesn’t want to be among the mature? But when you need to be among the mature, then you’re fighting for it, jockeying for position, and you’re not willing to leave promotion to God. Scripture says promotion comes from the Lord. Are you willing to trust that he will actually do what he said?

I knew a man a few years ago who had incredible testimonies of transformation, whole cities being transformed. He did not care about being seen. He would go around doing little house-group meetings with a dozen people. It was great. He was out there transforming cities, and he wasn’t looking for recognition. That’s the heart of a son. The orphan says, “If I don’t fight for it, nobody’s going to give it to me.” But with sonship, remember Isaac: what did Isaac have to do to get his inheritance? He just had to be alive. That’s it. If he was alive, he was getting the whole inheritance. All that Abraham had was his because he was a son. You and I have received all of that in Christ, because Christ did it for you. You haven’t accomplished it. You haven’t achieved it. Orphans achieve and sons receive. Orphans are trying to grab hold of their identity, and sons receive identity and then do things in partnership with the Father.

Jonathan Culley: Hearing the Father’s Voice

Jonathan Culley now has a testimony for us.

Thank you, Jonathan, that was excellent. I shared this morning how this is a long journey, and I think it’s not an instant journey for anybody, starting off understanding God as a Father and then figuring out what that means for you. I had that baseball moment where God made it clear to me that he was different than my dad, and that helped me to be open to some new things. A couple of years later something very tragic happened in our family, and right in the middle of it God spoke to me and helped me understand his heart for how much he accepts and loves us as his children. That made it so much easier to approach him.

Then God started challenging me to spend time with him and hear his voice, and I wanted to do that. I had grown up believing that I could hear God and that he could speak to me. But all of my conversations with God, and I didn’t realize it at the time, were like magic eight-ball questions. “Father, is this going to happen?” Yes. “Father, is that going to happen?” All signs indicate no. He would give me quick answers to things. It wasn’t a conversation.

I had felt led to start a business, and it was starting to take off, but I was really struggling. I was asking God what he needed to do, and I was getting words that I should spend time with God and that he would show me what to do and help provide. I really wanted to believe that, but I was having a hard time with it, because I was an orphan. I understood God as a Father and I believed that he was a Father, but I was an orphan trying to be responsible for my family, trying to get out and work hard and make it happen. I wasn’t being successful. I was trying to spend time with God, and I would ask him magic eight-ball questions and hardly hear anything. Where should I hand my flyers out today? What should I focus on? Should I market in some new way? I was trying to talk to him about the things that were important to me.

I’m not going to go through the whole story, though it’s very interesting. There was a day when it all came to a head. I determined that if it took all day to hear his voice, I was going to. I put on some music and I asked God a whole bunch of questions, every question I could. I was trying hard to listen. For four hours I heard really nothing. Finally I kind of broke, and I said, “What do you want to talk to me about?” That was the magic question. That was apparently the heart posture God was waiting for, because then for about an hour God talked to me nonstop. He sent me pictures. He showed me things. It was amazing. He didn’t talk to me about my business, and he didn’t talk to me about my problems. He talked to me about me, about how he saw me as a son, about what our relationship was supposed to look like, and about how he loves his other children. There were so many interesting things that he challenged me on.

The word I had been given was that if I spent time with God, he would redeem the time. So I spent this time, I’m at the end of my rope, and I get up from there. I get three phone calls in a row. Each one was a new contract that I had quoted ages ago and lost. They all came in, and they all had deposit checks. By the end of the day I had picked up two months’ worth of income. It was absolutely miraculous. My Father provided. On that day I switched from being an orphan to being a son. I didn’t realize it at the time. It was when I could start having that regular conversation with God, where he could speak to me about what he wanted to speak to me about, that it would change.

I’ll tell one more tiny story that goes after that. Every single day after that, I started by asking God, “Father, what do you want to say to your son today?” I would wait until I heard something, and then I would start my day. If I skipped that because business was taking off and I was too busy, everything would go crazy. Then I would stop and hear God, and he would fix everything and put it all back together again. God was teaching me that this is how he wanted me to relate to him.

Fast forward a few months. I’m starting to get a handle on this, God is blessing my business, and I know how to come and talk to him about things. It’s coming up on Christmas and my son’s birthday. I figured out what my budget needed to be, because our small family’s needs were not crazy, and I said, “Father, I need $1,800. I have to do Christmas, I have to do a birthday, I have this bill, the rent, and so on.” Then I heard nothing. I had become accustomed to hearing God talk to me all the time. A day went by, and I’d heard nothing. He didn’t bring a new contract my way, and this was all the things I expected, because that’s what he had done up until then. I said, “God, what’s going on? I’ve been asking you about this. I need $1,800.” He said, “Well, what do you need?” I said, “I just said it. I need $1,800.” He said, “No, really, what do you need?” I said, “I need $1,800 because I can do this and this and this.” He said, “Then pray for those things. You’re praying for the money. That’s praying for control. I don’t want to give you control.” Fine. Give my kids Christmas presents.

I was cutting the grass at that point when I had this conversation. I turned off the lawn mower, left it there, and walked inside, frustrated. Within a week somebody pulled into my driveway and said, “You’ve got three kids?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Three garbage bags,” handed them out the window, and drove away. I thought, “What just happened?” Each garbage bag was filled with brand-new kids’ things, age-appropriate for my kids, two girls and one boy. It was everything from large presents down to stocking stuffers. I didn’t have to buy my kids anything for Christmas. I told this story a while ago, and my son-in-law saw it on YouTube and asked, “Is that true?” My daughter said, “Yeah, it’s true. That was the year God gave me the Barbie house I wanted.”

I say all of that because if I had not pursued hearing God’s voice as a son, if he hadn’t changed my heart from an orphan to a son, I would not have approached any of those situations the same way. I wouldn’t have had that kind of conversation with God. I wouldn’t have been able to receive a very teachable moment about praying for control versus praying for just what I needed and letting him control how that was going to happen. It was a different place for my heart to be in, in partnership with a Father who saw me as a son, while I saw him as a Father.

And now to carry on with this topic, Mr. Bakker.

Mike Bakker: A People Pleaser’s Story

I don’t even really have to carry on, because both of you have already said it. Here’s what I’ve learned: some very effective teaching can be done simply by telling your story. You hope and pray that you can tell your story effectively and that there’s a lesson buried in there, and by God’s grace the lesson is relatively clear, right out on the plate.

You were handed the sheet on orphan to son. As I speak, I hope you might cast an ear toward me and occasionally cast a glance down at the sheet, because what I hope you’ll see is me traveling from orphan to son. Look at the top, from image of God right down to future, and watch this orphan start to travel over to the right side of the column. That’s my hope.

I was always very jealous of my older brother, who is seven years older than me. I learned very quickly, as I got to the age where I could understand social dynamics, that every kid wants a bestie. I have never met a kid who didn’t want to lay claim to having a best friend. Not every kid gets one. My older brother had his bestie from age three, and he’s 70 years old now. I’m 63. That bestie from age three is still his bestie today. Even though he lives in Red Deer, Alberta, they talk almost daily, by text or phone call, and at least a couple of times a year they actually get together. My friends were far more seasonal. I had them for a little while, and then the season would come to an end and I would find myself friendless, hoping I could somehow attach myself to some other group. When you’re a young kid you can kind of handle that. But what if that follows you into your teenage years?

As parents we know this, and if you’re well past the age of 13, you probably know this about yourself: at approximately age 13, all our brains get sucked out of our heads when it comes to the things of life and anything resembling wisdom. Some parents will tell you it gets reinjected with a giant syringe around 22 or 23, and then you can form whole sentences again. For me, being the person constantly trying to latch on to a group, I can say thank you, Jesus, that I did not have any horrific wreckage on the highway, no life-altering consequence from a decision so devoid of wisdom that it would follow me the rest of my days. How many of you know people, or maybe you’re one of these people, who say, “Why didn’t God save me from this really stupid thing I did?” It’s because we have this amazing gift called free will, which means we are free to destroy our lives with one or two really grand decisions. I’m grateful to him that in that time of being a bear of very little brain, I did not make any of those decisions.

What happened to me was far more insidious, just underneath the surface. It turned me inward, to my lack of desirability. Because I didn’t have a bestie or a small group of besties, I was undesirable as a friend. The result was that I became a textbook gold-medal people pleaser. I could have written a book on it. If there was money to be made, I’d have a brand-new Mercedes out in the parking lot right now. I got methodical about how to fit into any group that would accept me. Any mask that would get the job done in the moment, I simply assumed the identity of whoever I latched on to.

I was always nice, and I hate the word “nice” today. I’m thankful to my wife, who hated the word “nice” even before I did. It’s like the verse about being neither hot nor cold, lukewarm, and being spewed out of his mouth (Revelation 3). Lukewarmness is akin to niceness for me. We have some foodies in our church, some pit masters. If I said to Nolan or to John, “Those ribs were nice,” they would both say, “So my ribs were a failure.” There’s nothing nice about nice. What could possibly be attractive about that? I was not just nice, I was also safe. I hoped against hope that my current batch of friends would find me agreeable just long enough to keep me around.

There was always a nagging thing in the background, from the family I was raised in: religious guilt. If we hate rules, we still understand them. We know how to tick boxes, because it’s so much easier to tick a box if we can wrap our brain around the rule. It doesn’t do anything for our self-worth or our identity as sons, but if I can tick a box, at least I’ve done that. I really believed that if I ever got drunk, or smoked weed, or had sex before marriage, I would so disappoint God that surely my future would be very toasty in the bowels of hell. My identity dictated that my life would be wrapped up in the constant pursuit of other people’s opinions of me. Can you see where I am on the left-hand side of the column? I allowed myself to be whoever somebody else dictated me to be. I would be your social gopher. I would do what was needed, unless it was the thing that would have God send me to hell for the decision I had made. So I was scared, and I played it safe right down the middle. I would be a tag-along for whoever would adopt me for a little while.

When I first heard about this crazy notion that I am a son to a heavenly Father, it wasn’t crazy because I’d never heard that God was good. I grew up in church. Jesus loves me, this I know. I actually believed it, except for one thing: I believed it for everybody else. I believed it for Jonathan and Patti and Nolan and everyone around me. I did not believe it for me. I firmly believed that God had set me apart, and usually it’s really cool when God sets you apart, but what he set me apart for was anonymity and mediocrity. I guess I was supposed to be a sacrificial lamb. You always need somebody to occupy that space, and I was relegated to that area. God was good, even good to me, but when he was good to me, it was more like he was saying, “Oh, look at poor pathetic Mike. Okay, we’ll toss him a bone today.”

That’s who I was. What did I do, as an orphan and a people pleaser? I became who I needed to be to get by for one more day. For myself, I reserved the belief that God the Father was a judge, and my job was to remain on his good side. If I could get close to the center line without crossing over, I was somewhat safe. If I got too close and stumbled over, surely hellfire was waiting on the other side. And if I failed to jump through the holy hoops he set before me, I was at best a disappointment. That’s the most I could hope for.

No Obligation to the Old Nature

When Paul was talking to the Romans about life in the Spirit, he had no problem laying out the reality of having to deal with sinful urges. But we have the very Spirit of God living inside of us. This is what he said: “Therefore, dear brothers and sisters, you have no obligation to do what your sinful nature urges you to do. If you live by its dictates, you will die.” Obligation still carries the idea that we have a choice: you can, but you don’t have to. Your sinful nature will always press you toward what is temporal, what is fun in the moment, but ultimately destructive. If you want to give in to that, you can. You are under no obligation to do so, because you have the Spirit of the living God living inside you. You have another choice you can make.

We keep reading: “But if through the power of the Spirit you put to death the deeds of your sinful nature, you will live. 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 have received God’s Spirit when he adopted you as his own children. Now we call him, ‘Abba, Father.'” Jonathan already explained, and most of us already know, that the term “Abba” was for affection and intimacy. If you’re a very young child, you are literally referring to God your Father as “Daddy.” If you’re a little older and you need him, it might be “Dad.”

Let me ask for a quick show of hands. How many of you, throughout your childhood or into your youth, referred to your father strictly as “Father”? That’s wonderful. I was expecting at least a smattering of hands. My dad was a good dad, even though he was performance-based. He gave what he had to give, and I could call him “Dad.” I could go to him. The God of the universe, the Creator of the universe, is not only inviting us to call him Dad. He’s saying, “Call me Abba, because it is my desire that, by your choice, you would allow me to father you.” Fathering you means he’s not just going to try to rescue you out of the hole you’ve gotten yourself into. He wants you to invite him into the day you are living today and walk alongside him, because he has something really amazing in store for you.

A sinful urge doesn’t have to fit into the tidy little boxes of sex or substances. A sinful urge can be any lie that we believe, particularly when we are at least aware of the truth. When we are aware of the truth and we buy the lie anyway, we’ve given in to a sinful urge. Give that a thought for a second, because, as orphans, the sinful urge is what we know. We can bank on it. To not live the lie, to live in the truth that you are a son or a daughter of the King of the universe, is a conscious decision to trust that what he has in store for you is always and only very, very good.

In failing to seek my identity in the One who knows me best and loves me best, I settled on finding my identity in other people, most of whom were also looking for identity. When you give yourself over to being a tag-along with some social group, you have to understand that even the confident ones, even the leader of the pack, are also looking for identity. If they’re faking it really well, it’s only because other people have bought into their false identity. Society today is so screaming out for identity that people will latch on to anything that holds the smallest amount of promise. They’ll be let down at some point. I was let down consistently by my own choices. But the Father was always there, wooing me.

I went to a Christian school for grades one through seven, and then my mom and dad asked me, as a 12-year-old, whether I wanted to go to the Christian school in Abbotsford (we lived in Chilliwack) or to public school. I wanted public school, so I wound up in a very transient junior high with a lot of rough kids, and that’s where I learned to be a people pleaser. But I also ran into a couple of crazy Pentecostal boys, born and raised in a tiny place in Nova Scotia. They didn’t have a TV set. All they had was the family piano. They had a very alive relationship with God, and they invited me into their bunch as a real friend, well beyond tagging along. It was the first time I had friends where I got the very real feeling that they wanted me around just for me. I had something that would make their lives richer, and they weren’t going to get sucked dry trying to feed my ego. That was the first time I had any notion that I had any value at all.

I was still a people pleaser, though, like a lost puppy chasing other lost puppies, with the lead puppy chasing his own tail. I never actually arrived. I just ran around in circles. All I had managed to do was find a more positive circle, a better circle, and just surviving, never thriving, was something a spiritual orphan like me had become incredibly adept at. As an orphan I learned to survive believing that no one was acting in my interests, so I needed to do that for myself.

Earthly Parents and the Inheritance

I mentioned earlier that my dad rode the line between passive and performance-based parenting. Make no mistake, he loved me without a doubt. He loved me the best way he knew how, and every once in a while there were little snippets of evidence that, with what he had to give, he gave it freely. Remember that this was post-World War II, coming from Europe, when you showed you loved your family by providing for them physically, with a home and so on. I remember almost every Christmas my mom and dad saying, “It was a rough year in the business, so we don’t know what Christmas is going to be like, but we’ll try our best.” I only ever remember Christmases being absolutely wonderful. My mom was a great baker and a great cook, and my dad would somehow pull something out. We always got one big gift, one little gift, and stocking stuffers. One year I got a hockey stick, and it was the most amazing thing. I couldn’t wait to curve the blade and go out with my buddies to play hockey on the roads. My hockey stick was my big gift. My dad managed to pull it out even when times got tough.

Earthly parents raise us out of what they know and have experienced themselves, unless there is healing. That is the great divider. They can’t give what they haven’t got. When we forgive our parents, as Jonathan was leading us through some of those prayers this morning, we need to arrive at the place where, when we release our fathers from whatever shortcomings they had as dads, the reality of releasing them comes from that very first thought: they couldn’t give what they didn’t have to give. You only give out of an overflow of what you’ve already received. That doesn’t make it any better for you, because you’re still dealing with this deficit in parenting. There are no two ways about that. But this is not God. Our Father has never been and never will be in a deficit of being able to give perfect love to his children. He is the fullness of love, and everything he does in his parenting is perfectly in line with that heart toward his kids.

I want to read to you from Galatians 4. Galatians has already been mentioned, and if you haven’t noticed in what the others have shared, there’s a theme to the scripture we are sharing. These are the heavy hitters when it comes to the Father heart of God. We’re talking about whole passages, not individual verses. If you build a theology around a single cherry-picked verse, it won’t hold water. But when we refer to these passages, we’re referring to big meaty chunks of the Father’s heart toward us.

“Think of it this way. If a father dies and leaves an inheritance for his young children, those children are not much better off than slaves until they grow up. Even though they actually own everything their father had, they have to obey their guardians until they reach whatever age their father set. And that’s the way it was with us before Christ came. We were like children, slaves to the basic spiritual principles of this world. But when the right time came, God sent his Son, born of a woman, subject to the law. 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 a slave but God’s own child. And since you are his child, God has made you an heir.”

My parents died several years ago. After several months, my older brother, who was the executor of the estate, told me what they had and what they owed, and he looked after the bills and paid all that off. At the very end of it all he said, “Mike, I have a check for you.” I went and picked up the check, and I said, “That’s lovely. Thank you, Mom and Dad, for stewarding your funds so well that you could leave your kids something.” But somebody had to die. In this earthly life you don’t receive an inheritance until somebody dies. It’s possible that some of the parenting we received may even, in a weaker moment, have caused us to wish for a person’s death so that we could realize the inheritance that we knew was coming to us. We would probably never say that out loud, except maybe at a point of great frustration or weakness.

Jesus died. He rose again. He’s alive. He is our brother and our Savior. He says, “Nobody comes to the Father except through me.” Jesus is the way. He’s saying, “I did the job. Let me introduce you to somebody.” He calls you son. He calls you daughter. You get to live in the wealth of that inheritance today. Not with money. Money comes and goes, and it gets spent sometimes wisely, sometimes foolishly. Stuff fades away. The inheritance we have is a life waiting for us, living for eternity in the presence of that Father.

Give yourself a moment to think about what it would be like to have that perfect parent, perfect in every way imaginable, with no fault to be found in him at all. You get that Dad, that Abba, and you get to live in his presence for all of eternity. I like mechanical watches. I’m blown away by the way the gears turn. On the other side of eternity I’m not going to be wearing one of these. Time will have no consequence for me at all, because God is already outside of time, and he’s pulling us across that threshold where we don’t have to look at the clock on the wall or the clock on my wrist anymore, because we get to enjoy eternity with that perfect Father. That inheritance comes by way of a God who was never more alive and always will be. There is no more need for death.

Paul is telling us that because of Christ’s sacrifice we can enjoy the inheritance of spiritual sonship right now. We are full heirs right now. Jesus lives in you, and you’ve received his Spirit. Paul says we cry out “Abba,” which goes deeper than “Father.”

How Sonship Changes Our Families

How does sonship affect my own parenting? How does it change my relationship with my own parents? My own dad softened in his old age. Knowing who I am to my heavenly Father, a son held with the deepest affection, I had brand-new confidence with my dad to start sharing things beyond work and the grandkids. I hope that, looking at the chart Jonathan handed out earlier, a whole lot of what I told you was left-side stuff, and I hope you now hear the migration over to the right side.

My dad and I started to have conversations about the new church I was going to, and we got into theological conversations. He was a lifelong learner. He often said the day you stop learning is the day your brain starts going backwards, so he always made a point of knowing something new. He certainly didn’t buy all of these weird, non-Calvinist ideas I was coming to him with. But he respected me enough to listen, and sometimes he even bought what I was telling him. “Whoa, I never really thought of that.” Then we would debate. When I learned whose I really was and who I really belonged to, my earthly father started to see a change too, and he engaged me in a completely different way. It was fun. I got to enjoy my dad in the last year and months of his life. I lost him to lung cancer. He said he didn’t want treatment, that the Lord had given him 86 years and he had lived them as a blessed man. Even in that time, he would engage me as somebody who had something of value to share with him. I had never experienced that with him in my entire life: that I had something to give him that he did not otherwise possess. It was a beautiful thing. I was able to let my dad off the hook by forgiving him internally for whatever his failings were. I could invite him into my life in greater measure, and he responded. Not perfectly, but my stretching my perception of what fatherhood was caused him to respond, and I often witnessed a little glimmer of growth in his own attitude.

Secondly, it affected the way I parented. I’m a father of four. My wife has for the longest time had an out-loud relationship with the Lord. Mine was far more insular. I liked to talk about it on an intellectual basis. My wife always opted for heart first. She knew something I didn’t know. We were talking about whether we had ever actually spoken to our kids, now that they were at an age where we could confess our shortcomings a little and ask for forgiveness. That was her idea, because she felt it might make a whole new bridge into our relationship with our adult children.

So, one by one, I took three of our four children aside (our fourth we ended up adopting, and the situation was a whole lot different). We sat on the couch and I said, “Sweetheart, I need to confess to you. These are the things. When you were younger, I didn’t do this, and I should have done that, and I’m really sorry. I hope you can forgive me.” I hoped the response would be, “I forgive you, Dad. I love you. Can I go back upstairs now? It’s getting weird.” What was their response? Every single one of them, at different times, said, “Dad, I don’t recall you not being a good dad. You were there when I needed you to be. I understand discipline and stuff like that. No, I don’t feel failed by you as a parent at all.” My kids, who shouldn’t have known better, knew so much more than me. I was so gratified by their response, because it was not at all what I felt I deserved. In that little five-minute exchange with our three oldest kids, I heard the voice of the Father. I’m the dad talking to my kids, and what comes out of their mouths is the voice of my Abba. There was no judgment. There was no correction. There was affirmation, and a settling once and for all of how they felt about me, and their affection was deeply rooted. That undid me. I did not see that coming at all.

Becoming a Son

How do I conclude something like this? We have about ten minutes, and that’s good, because we’re going to do some praying after this. Where am I today? I’m a son today, but I’m also becoming a son. As you already heard this morning, the journey to sonship, to daughterhood, is not a once-and-done thing. When you realize that you are a child of the King and you pursue that relationship, there are always new layers to peel off and new depths to go down to. This morning we heard that we dig down a little, we get a nice big gold nugget, and we keep digging deeper, down to the foundation. Life as a son is going after the mother lode, which you’ll never reach on this side of heaven. If somebody tells you they’ve reached it, turn off your ears, spin on your heels, and walk away quickly. We are on a journey that will lead us to our very last breath. As we cross the finish line, our coach, whose name is also Jesus, says, “Enter into your rest, good and faithful servant,” right into the arms of the Father. That is where the mother lode exists. Our journey on this earth is always going to be pursuing newer, better, deeper levels of intimacy with the One we call Father, whose love is perfection.

So I am becoming a son. I am assured of my belonging to him. I am reminded constantly of my identity, and, as I was just sharing, he uses my very own kids to remind me of it. As a son, I know there’s no need to do a single thing to earn my sonship. It is impossible. But what I do for my Father is not done out of duty. It is done to please him. Why do I want to please him? Good dads have kids who want to emulate them. My dad was a master carpenter and an artist. If you hired him, you could be sure of two things: an incredible finished product, and that it would take him forever to finish the job. But the product, oh my goodness. As a son, I now love woodwork. I want to do what my Abba Father does. I don’t want him behind me, hoping he’s going to bless my endeavors. I want him beside me so that I can say, “What’s next, Dad?” and let him take the lead. It’s a pleasure to do it. How I serve now is the response of a son who just wants to be like his Dad.

A Prayer to Be Fathered

I want to wrap up with prayer. Just stand up for a second and shake your hands a little bit. Then you can sit down for a bit. I want to pray a prayer to be fathered. If you have never known a father like that, I want you to accept this invitation to be fathered by your heavenly Abba. He is not an authority figure in title alone. He is deeply, deeply in love with you, and his affection is unending. Join me in prayer and agree with this prayer. If you want to be fathered by God, I’ll put the mic down for a moment and you can pray along.

Father, we ask you now that you would allow us to set aside any notion of who we thought you were, and any notion that our earthly parents were a reflection of who you are. We want to be fathered by you, who are perfect in love, perfect in your pursuit of us, perfect in your plans for us, perfect in the inheritance that you have laid out for us. If you would, repeat this after me. Father, I’m asking you to father me. Forgive me for any wrong notion I’ve had of you, and allow me to see you as you are. Show me yourself as you are. Show me that Abba that I so need. I invite you to take up residence in me. I invite you to remind me often of your affection for me. Help me, from this moment on, to assume my sonship, to live as a child of the living God, and to invite you into my day to take the lead. Remind me that your plans for me are so good. Thank you, Father, that you love me, that you are eternal, and that you have promised me an eternity that begins today. I live as a son, as a daughter of the Most High God, who does not command that we live in servitude to you, but invites us to live in intimate relationship with a perfect Parent. Thank you, Jesus. Amen.