The Father You Already Have

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!” — Romans 8:15 (ESV)

I have been to court a few times in my day. Ok, more than a few times, but don’t read too much into that. It’s not a fun place; then again, it is not supposed to be. The results are not always pleasant, even if you win your case. For example, a man can be acquitted in a courtroom and still go home to an empty house. The judge declares him innocent, the gavel falls, the record comes back clean, and then he walks out into the street a free man and a stranger, with nowhere in particular to belong. We are very good, in our own circles, in the courtroom. We can explain the doctrine of justification in our sleep. A forensic declaration made from the throne of God regarding our legal standing before Him and His Law. Righteous! Having never sinned! It is not pardoned, for that says you sinned, but you’re being let off with a warning of some sort. That’s not justification. But in the “real world,” in our communities, we tend to associate a good verdict with being acquitted. Then we live as acquitted strangers, clean but a little cold, sure we are forgiven and not always sure we are loved. The Apostle Paul will not leave us standing in the street like that, looking around, wondering if someone’s going to pick me up.

…you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” (Romans 8:15)

True justification clears the record completely, and adoption gives you a home. These are not the same gift, and the second is the one that most believers have never learned to feel or experience. God did not haul you out of the dock merely to send you on your way reconciled. He took you into the house. He put His name on you. He made you a son.

Abba. It is the word a small child uses, the first and plainest name for a father, the word said before a child can say almost anything carefully or with much thought. The Spirit does not teach the believer to approach God only with a formal petition drawn up in proper order. He puts a cry in the heart, an unrehearsed longing, the artless cry of a child who knows whose lap he is climbing into and knows in the deepest part of his heart that he is safe there. You did not earn the right to that word. It was given the day you were given the Holy Spirit.

And notice it is a cry. Not some conclusion you reason your way to on a strong morning, but something the Spirit Himself works up from inside you, often when you are at the very end of yourself. The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God (Romans 8:16). Your sonship does not rest on the strength of your feeling about it. It rests on the witness of God’s own Spirit, who was sent into your heart for the express purpose of crying Father.

We don’t hear as much about the doctrine of adoption as we should, and here is what is lost when it goes unpreached. The forgiven-but-not-adopted man still lives like a man on probation, reading every silence from heaven as displeasure, measuring the day by the day’s performance. But a son does not work to become a son. He is one before he rises in the morning, and he is one when he has failed by noon. The obedience of a son is not the frightened labor of a hireling. It is the glad response of a child who already belongs and could not be unbelonged by a bad day.

And if today you feel far from home, then hear this my friend. The father in the Lord’s story did not wait on the porch with folded arms to see whether the prodigal’s apology would be good enough. He saw him a long way off and ran. That is the heart you were adopted into. Not a reluctant guardian who tolerates you, but a Father who runs. Your feeling of distance is not the measure of His fatherhood. His Spirit crying in you is. We simply must stop looking so much at ourselves and start looking unto Him.

So learn to say the word again. Not as a stranger asking a favor of the bench, but as a child climbing back into the only lap that was ever truly yours. If you are truly born again, truly a Christian, you are justified, forgiven, yes. But hear the larger mercy underneath it. You are His. Abba. Father.

Teach us, Lord, to come home.