Union with Christ IX: The Privileges of Adoption

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Welcome to the

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Whole Council Podcast, I'm Jon Snyder and with me again is A .C. Floyd and we're looking at the doctrine of union with Christ.

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Really, probably we could say it is the central doctrine of the application of the gospel at least.

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It's at the heart of so much that Paul writes in the New Testament to explain how is it that anyone from Adam's fallen race might be able to read the

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New Testament, hope in that Christ, embrace him according to his terms, and then be able to say the things about themselves that Paul says about a believer.

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The only way those things could be true is that we are actually united to that mediator or that representative.

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We are in him. So, we're looking at that theme and we're looking at the privilege of spiritual adoption which comes with union with Christ.

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Ephesians 1, when Paul speaks of all the spiritual blessings that we have in the heavenly places in Christ, he begins in verse 4 of that first chapter of Ephesians and he begins to list these aspects of spiritual blessing.

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We could say the various privileges of the new covenant. So, in verse 4 he says, just as he, that is the father, chose us in him, in the son, before the foundation of the world and we spoke about that.

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The next verse he speaks of another privilege. It says, he predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to himself according to the kind intention of his will.

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And verse 6 kind of sums that up, to the praise of the glory of his grace, which he freely bestowed on us in the beloved in Christ.

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So, we're looking at adoption and how that is one of the privileges that we are able to enjoy as Christians by union with Christ.

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Now, we talked about that last week. What we want to do this week is we want to borrow some help from John Owen and little book he wrote,

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Communion with God, which the Banner of Truth Publishing has put out in the

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Puritan paperback. This is the newer cover. And I looked at my emails today and I saw they were running a sale and this was on sale.

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But by the time this comes out, it may not be on sale. So we can't guarantee that, you know. In the book,

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Owen deals with how we hold fellowship or communion with God distinctly as Father, Son and Spirit.

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And so it's, in a sense, it's a unique work. How the Trinitarian nature of God affects our communion with him.

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What does he as Father give of himself to us? How do we receive that?

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And how do we appropriately respond to him as Father and then as Son and then Spirit? It's my favorite

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John Owen book. It's certainly a very warm hearted book. And I think for Owen, a very readable book.

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In chapter 17, in the section where he deals with how we hold communion with God, the

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Son. So there's that transaction constantly going on, the Son giving us himself.

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We receive that by faith and we respond. And you know, what's unique in that.

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In chapter 17, he's dealing with communion with Christ in privileges.

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And his section on communion with Christ is the largest in the book. The Father is a shorter section.

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The Son is a long section and the Spirit's a shorter section. And in chapter 17, he devotes the entire chapter to the nature of our spiritual adoption and the privileges that come with that.

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And Owen's going to emphasize in this chapter is that there are privileges that come from both sides of adoption, which

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I find really helpful. That there are privileges that come from being transferred out of a family.

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And there are privileges that come from being transferred into a new family. And I want to read a bit from this chapter and more than we normally read.

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So I'll try to be clear. And if you can just kind of put your thinking cap on, I want to give you a basic outline and some introductory statements that Owen makes.

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And then once we get through that, then AC and I will just pick a couple of things from the chapter, since we don't have time to cover all of it, a couple of things from the chapter that we find personally very encouraging or spiritually helpful.

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So let me give you some basic statements that Owen makes about adoption.

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He's going to talk about human adoption first, and then he's going to, in the latter part of the chapter, drive that home and say, do you see how the

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Bible shows that we have this in our spiritual adoption? So the first thing he says is, adoption is the authoritative transfer of a believer by Jesus Christ from the family of the world and Satan into the family of God with his being admitted into all the privileges and advantages of that family.

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Then Owen goes on to say a number of things about that. These are basic truths because that's true.

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And he draws out the comparison. Let's think about human adoption. He says, number one, the person to be adopted must be actually and of his own right of another family than that into which he is to be adopted.

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So you have to be a member of another family to be taken out of that and put into a new family.

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Second, the person to be adopted must have no right whatever of his own to be taken in to the new family.

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Third, the person to be adopted must be taken out of his natural family and by an authoritative legal transaction be put into the other family.

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No person, he says, has the right to adopt when and whom they would.

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You know, we can't look at someone's kid and we go, you know, I really like so -and -so's kid.

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I think I'll just take them to be my kid. It needs to be a legal transaction. It needs to have the appropriate authority.

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So he says, this must be done by the authority of a sovereign power. Number four, the person to be adopted must be freed from all the obligations that held him to his own family, to his natural family.

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Otherwise, he cannot in any way be useful or serviceable to the family which adopts him.

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He cannot serve two masters, much less two fathers. And number five, the person to be adopted must by virtue of his adoption be admitted into all the rights, privileges, advantages, and title to the whole inheritance of the family into which he is adopted in as full a manner as if he had been born into that family.

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So those are wonderful truths. We see that even in human adoption. And then

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Owen is going to go on to make some other general statements and then apply it spiritually. So his next general statement, this authoritative transfer of believers from one family to another is done by the public declaration of the adopted persons being set free from all obligations to the former family to which he by nature was related.

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And then he talks about spiritually, how does it, then he goes on to say spiritually, how does

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God declare that a believer has been transferred from one family to the next?

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And he gives some sub points under that. The next general statement is there is an authoritative engrafting of the believer actually into the family of God and the admitting of him into the whole right and title of sonship.

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Then he goes on and sums it up by saying the last two things required for adoption are that the adopted person is freed from all obligations to the family from which he has been taken and is admitted into all the rights and privileges of the family into which he has been adopted.

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Now, what follows in the chapter is his specifics of the rights and privileges of the adopted in a spiritual way.

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And the book is just crammed with passages with biblical evidences of these things for the next five or six pages.

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And he says, first, when we are adopted, we first of all receive liberty.

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So we are freed from every unpleasant aspect of the old family and then freed into all the wonderful privileges of a new family.

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And he gives a number of specifics, particularly dealing with the issue of the law. It's condemning, you know, it's burdensome aspects for the unbeliever, the fear, the shame, freed from all of that, but freed in the new family with a new heart to live the same commands happily from love.

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Second, he says, another privileges. The second thing that children of God have by adoption is title or privilege.

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And he spends a good deal of time on that. Third, we have a threefold inheritance as children of God by adoption.

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And then he just kind of sums it up at the end, which I think is unusual for Owen. I feel like I do this every sermon, you know, you get to the end and you see it in Spurgeon sermons when you're reading them.

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Sometimes he says he has three points. And at the end of the second point, you know, you're, you're, you're like at the last page of the printed sermon and you think, what's he going to do?

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And he just says, well, we've gone kind of long. So let me just say, and he gives you the rapid.

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That's what Owen does. The last paragraph of the chapter, he just kind of gives a list like, well,

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I could say so much more. Here are a whole list of things that are also privileges of adoption.

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And here's the list, boldness with God by Christ, affliction coming from love and leading to our spiritual good.

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The privilege of being called sons of God, being heirs and joint heirs with Christ, being predestined to be conformed to the image of God's son, being called

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Christ's brethren. Fellowship in Christ's sufferings is another privilege.

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He learned obedience by what he suffered and every son that he receives is to be disciplined or, you know, a fatherly discipline leading to the same kind of holiness.

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Fellowship in his kingdom, reigning with Christ. So he just gives it just a quick kind of list of these are other things.

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All right. So that's a quick overview of the chapter and some of Owen's major points and some of his specific privileges that he mentioned.

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So AC, as you looked over the chapter, we did this as a church a couple of years ago.

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And I remember, I remember reading it the first time with Jordan Thomas and Anthony Mathenia and Scott Dooley and some other guys,

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Chuck Baggett from the church here. We met with guys in Memphis and we read

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McShane's memoirs. And at the end of that, we all felt quite convicted, you know, like, well, that's it.

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You know, his life is so stirring and what the Lord did through him is so encouraging. But, you know, one aspect of that is that, well, maybe we're not even

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Christians at all. You know, we quit. So then we went from immediately from McShane and I chose this book.

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And I'm glad I did because we all felt it was just like it was the perfect follow up where Owen describes, well, how do we walk in communion with God in a way that McShane did?

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And how do we constantly receive what we need to live the Christian life? And this was the sweetest book for that.

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So when you read over it again, what are the things that jump out at you as particularly helpful?

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The first point that Owen made that, like we talked about before the podcast began, just thrills the soul, specifically my soul, was,

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I'm going to list page numbers, if that's okay. That's fine. On page 181 of this book, the bottom first full paragraph, this authoritative transfer of believers from one family to another is done by public declaration of the adopted persons being set free from all obligations to the former family to which by nature he was related.

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After reading that, just that first description of what's going on here, this authoritative transfer, and seeing that there's a declaration, my mind immediately went to Romans 8 and thinking about the declaration that will come in the end, so to speak, when the sons of God are presented to all creation and everyone is going to see

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God claiming his children fully and finally, bringing them into the new heavens and the new earth and saying, these are mine, they've been mine from before the foundation of the world.

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I brought them to myself in time and space, but now, now they're with me in a way that they've never been with me before, but in the way that they're always going to be with me in eternity.

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That's where my mind went, but then I look at what

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Owen says, and he says, but there's a declaration before that day. Yeah, a present awareness that we have a right to say,

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I am, by the astonishing grace of God, his child. Right, right, and he talks about how that we are declared the children of God, the adopted children of God to three different groups of people.

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He lists the angels. The angels are aware presently, right now, that John Snyder is a child of God, that A .C.

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Floyd is a child of God. The host of heaven knows who are the lords, because the

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Lord has tasked them to be messengers and helpers for us as we would walk in the

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Christian life. The second category that Owen uses to describe who knows that we're the children of God, the adopted children of God, is

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Satan himself, and he talks about how Satan knows that we're the children of God because Christ has come in as the stronger man and bound the strong man,

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Satan, and plundered his house. So, Satan knows because he's been defeated.

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Christ has been in his face, so to speak. The confrontation has been had. The war was won, so to speak, at the cross, and a people were won to him.

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So, Satan knows that he's been defeated and that ultimately his efforts are doomed, and that happens in our adoption, in us being his children.

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But the third category that Owen talks about is us, specifically our conscience, that when we are brought near to God, when we are authoritatively adopted by him, his spirit, the

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Holy Spirit, testifies to our spirit that we are his children. That's amazing to me that there is, in a sense, a conversation between the

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Holy Spirit and my spirit within me, and they come to an agreement. You're his child, and my spirit says back to the spirit, yes,

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I am. That's astonishing to me that those words are in the

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Bible, and in a real sense, it's astonishing to me in the day -to -day that that can be said, and that's true.

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So, Owen's pointing out, it's not just that we've been given the extraordinary expression of an undeserved love in being brought into God's family, but we are enabled to enjoy the assurance of that, and all that flows from that, the alteration of so much of how we think about God, how we think about ourselves, how we think about sin, and the world, and life here, and why we're still here.

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All of that is being daily transformed, in part, by the realization that I am a child of God now.

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So, my identity has been so radically and legally altered, like with justification.

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My legal position with God has been fundamentally and irreversibly altered, and that changes the way

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I walk out of the courtroom. That changes the way I wake up and live now. So, with justification, we have the removal of shame and guilt, and the possibility of future condemnation, but in adoption, similar to justification, but a familial, you know,

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I am waking up surrounded by a family -like love.

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I'm not merely forgiven, I'm embraced and brought as close to God as human metaphors can present.

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I am in Him, I am part of the bride of Christ, but I am the adopted child of God, and He lets me know it so that I can enjoy it now, in all my imperfections, and in an imperfect world with imperfect churches,

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I'm still enabled to enjoy it now, which is a great gift. So, in a sense, what he says there, you know, that there is a legal transaction, but there's also a declaration.

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The declaration, it's like icing on top. It's another gift. It's letting you know all that you need to know so that right now might be lived in the joy of your new family.

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Where do we get that declaration? I mean, we don't get it from the sky, like the

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Lord Jesus, the only begotten, this is my beloved Son. So, where do you look for that, you know, particularly with your own conscience?

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Where do you look, AC, to know I am adopted? I look to His Word.

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Yeah, the gospel. And Owen mentions that. It's declared in the gospel. Romans 8, it's declared with a sense of immediacy.

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There's an experiential, by the Holy Spirit, there's a supernatural experiential kind of awareness along with the

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Word. You're never separated from the Word. I would be very concerned about a person that says, oh,

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I just know that I'm a believer. And you say, wonderful. What makes you say that?

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And they say, I just feel it. And you look, you know, what in Scripture?

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Have you embraced Him? Have you met Him in these promises? Have you, the old writers would say, closed with Him?

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You know, have you drawn to Him? And has He drawn near to you in these promises? And they may say, well, no,

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I haven't even really looked at those seriously. I just know I feel, I just feel like a Christian. So that would be very dangerous.

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And John mentions, you know, another aspect by which God declares our adoption. And that is that we are being worked in by Him as a father, working with His Son in a way that He doesn't work with someone else's son down the street.

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So we have those wonderful realities. And together, you know, we have the declaration to our own conscience.

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Why do we need it, though? And I was thinking, if a baby is adopted, you know, as an infant, that child never knows any other parents.

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And so maybe later the parents will say, we need to explain to you, you were actually adopted. And so the child would think, well, so I understand that there's that legal transaction, but in my mind, you're the only parents that exist.

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But if a person is adopted, say at age 11, they may remember parents or, you know, children's homes they lived in or foster homes they were sent to.

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When you go into a new family and you're old enough to realize, look, I wasn't born here. And, you know,

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I think about how we have an adopted daughter and a natural born daughter. My natural born daughter, she learned that she was our daughter every second of every day as she's lived her life, whether when she cried as an infant and we showed up or whether she was hurt and we picked her up and, you know, wiped off the bruise, cut knee, or whether we're the ones that provided food and clothing.

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You know, I mean, there's 10 ,000 lessons that are happening. And the message is you belong to us and we belong to you.

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And this is the dynamic of that relationship. But if you're adopted, our adopted daughter, she didn't have all those 10 ,000 small lessons.

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And so in a short period of time with a more mature brain, she has to learn,

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I have a right to call them mom or dad, or I have a right to expect a parental love from them.

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I have a right to everything that my now new sister has always had.

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And for that, you know, we need a legal action.

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We need to know it's not based on feelings. I'm not just a guest because if I'm a guest,

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I can act so bad that, you know, my friend's parents would say, we're calling your mom and she's going to come get you because you have been terrible.

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And if we're just friends, there's a time where the parents say, it's time for Johnny to go home.

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He's been here all day and he's not looking like he's leaving, you know, he's just sitting there.

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And, you know, so how do we know that we're not just guests, that we're not just being befriended temporarily?

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How do we know we have an unshakable right to these privileges? And that is what

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Owen explains. There is a legal transaction. Without that, we appreciate his friendship, but we have no solid foundation for thinking it'll be there tomorrow morning.

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And so we need to be told that again and again, you are legally in my family and not in the old family.

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You said there was another thing that you found helpful. What was that? Yeah. On page 183, about the middle of the page, he says, there's an authoritative engrafting of the believer actually into the family of God and the admitting of him into the whole right and title of sonship.

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And as Owen begins to unpack that thought, he starts with talking about how the believer is given a new name.

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And that's such a wonderful picture because we have so many biblical examples to look to in that regard.

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As you and I talked about this earlier, there's Jacob, who was the heel grabber and the trickster who becomes

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Israel. Jacob is now the prince of God. We look at Abram, who became

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Abraham. He went from an exalted one to the father of the multitudes.

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So anytime you see a name change in the Bible, it is such a clear declaration that that person is in a different way, in a way that they had not been before.

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They belong to God. Even here at Christ Church, I've been here 12 years.

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You've been pastoring the church for 24 years. There have been a handful of times when families have adopted children.

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I can think of one family in particular. They adopted a son and a daughter. And the son and a daughter, they didn't have a last name, and they had different names that they have now.

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And I can remember us getting an email from Lanny Autry, and it was a long, detailed email explaining the adoption and how it had been finalized, and how this daughter had a new name.

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And now she had a last name, and how this son had a new name. And it took me a long time. It took you.

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I'm bad with names anyway. Well, I still... And when people switch them. I still remember... Southerners have to have two names.

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Well, that is true. Laura Mae. I think that's cruel. It is cruel. I can't remember everybody's name. But it's tradition, and we keep it.

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John Daven. I named my kid John Daven. So... Yeah, a new name. A new identity.

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A new identity. So they are... I mean, that's just such a demonstrable example. They are so clearly not who they once were.

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They do not belong to the same family that they once belonged to. They are in this household. And as Owen talks about that, he goes on to mention that this is like a certificate of admission into the house of God, this new name.

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He begins to talk about... It is the white stone of judicial acquittal.

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So it's carved in stone. It's unalterable. It's a declaration that, yes, you have a new name, that you have a new family, that you're adopted, but you're also, like you'd mentioned earlier, you're justified.

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You're cleared of any wrongdoing. God has spoken over you that you are

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His, and He sees you as well -pleasing. Just to round out this point, on the following page, on page 184,

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Owen mentions that God has a catalog of His household, and that Christ knows

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His sheep by name. So He knows your name, but it's not like, you know,

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I can remember in grade school having a teacher on the first day of class read off all of our names.

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Well, there was no warmth in that reading off of the name. There was no personal nature to it.

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It was just a name. I'm just making sure everybody that's supposed to be in my class is in my class. But when

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God adopts us as His children, when He knows our name, He knows every single last detail about us.

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He takes notice of us. He loves us peculiarly.

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You know, He doesn't love us in like a big lump, a one -size -fits -all kind of love.

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He knows each of our frames, and He loves us specifically. Something else

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Owen goes on to mention is a quote from Psalm 87, verse 6. He says that when

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God writes up the people, He declares that this man was born in Zion.

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So He declares that we're born into this kingdom. We're born into this family.

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We are not who we once were. We are unchangeably, unalterably belonging to the family of God.

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We are of His people now and forevermore. Yeah, and there are just so many things in the chapter.

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I think the one, I'll limit myself to this one. I think that probably the most helpful thing about the chapter as a whole, and then there are a lot of specific things under that, is that when

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I've thought in the past about adoption, I've thought about the spiritual privileges I'm brought to in being brought into the family of God, but I have not often thought of the bitter consequences, the bitter realities that surround continually the life of the unbeliever, because you belong to the wrong family.

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Whose family are you? Adam's. That family, the family that has from the very beginning, almost day one, has hated the king, has fought against the king.

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Every single one of your relatives, except for the God man, has lived against the king or was born in the wrong camp.

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And of course, from the family of Adam, God has amazingly chosen to make

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His enemies, His friends, His children, His subjects. And so that's the amazingness of grace, but I often forget all the wonderful realities of what

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I don't have because I have been legally separated from the old family, and I have no obligations, no connections with the old family in that sense.

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So I'm freed from the shame of that family. I'm free from the collective guilt of that family.

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You know, if something atrocious is done by, let's say, a father in a family does something horrific, it's not just that he has done something that's put him in jail.

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It's that in a small town, everyone in the town knows this man, Mr. So -and -so, did a horrible, indescribably horrible thing.

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And now he's in prison for the rest of his life. And then his wife and children are left in that small town. And the stink of that, the shame of that, even though they have no blame in it, they didn't do it.

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But just having the name, just being known as that man's daughter, that man's wife, you know, so maybe they decide to just leave that small town.

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It's just too much. And they go somewhere else. Maybe they change their name. But we couldn't do that.

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God could do that. He could bring us out of that family of shame. If you think of every horrible thing, the list of the most horrible things a human can do, and so the worst sins a human can do, so to speak, the most shocking.

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And every time that's been done by any human from the beginning of time in any nation, at any point, all of that is collected together under Adam's name.

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That's the fallen family. And it's a shameful thing. And to be brought into the family of God, where you are distinguished by your elder brother's behavior and treated in light of his representation, it's just shocking.

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But there are so many other things, you know, you're freed from the old inheritance, the judgment that you couldn't shake.

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You're freed from the constant fear and distrust of God, your creator. You're free from, you know, the old relatives, so to speak.

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And you're freed from the fear of the law. Owen spends a long time talking about the law, which is perfect, but because of sin, you approach the law in a sense you could say, you approach the law from the wrong direction.

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It's the only way you can approach it because you're a sinner. And so you approach it and it becomes a burden. It is a condemning, exposing, fearful thing.

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It's Mount Sinai. But because of being in the new family, you approach that father's will from a totally different angle.

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It's satisfied because of Christ's obedience. It looks upon you with favor because you've been washed.

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And now he talks about the freedom of being in the new family with this new heart.

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You are free to obey. And oftentimes, you know, when we look at scripture and it talks about being free in Christ, we might say, now that doesn't mean you're free to do everything you want to do.

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You're free to do what he wants you to do. And I think that that is an inadequate description. It's accurate as far as it goes, but it doesn't say everything that it should say.

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It's not just that a Christian is now freed from an old master, but we're enslaved to the new master.

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And now you're free to obey a new master and his will is better. So that's better. Well, that's true, but there's something greater about the freedom.

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In being brought into the family, there is such a transformation in the heart that from within, we want to express love to our new father.

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We're not perfect at it, but that's a new desire within us. And we have the ability by the spirit to do the will of our new father.

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And so when the heart and the body, so to speak, is able to do what it wants to do, think of a kid just running out on recess and playing.

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When the heart gets to do what it wants to do and the body is able to do what the heart wants to do.

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We look at kids running around on the, you know, at recess and we think that's freedom.

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You know, the man who wants to do that, but he can't because his body doesn't do that anymore. Or the person that's forced to run around and play, you know, but the kid would rather be sitting, reading a book.

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That's not freedom. Freedom for the Christian is that in being adopted into the new family and the new heart is given, we are free with heart and body, mind, emotions, will.

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We are free to do what we want to do. We want to walk in a way or live in a way that pleases him.

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That's perfect freedom. And of course, we don't have that perfectly right now, but we do have a taste of it.

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You know, that's totally different. Well, we've just hit really only a couple of things that Owen gives.

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So if you haven't read this little book, Communion with God, that the Banner of Truth has put out in this slightly edited form, it's abridged by a man named

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RJK Law. And he, everyone that he did, I think is just great.

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You can't tell they're edited. He has not, you haven't lost anything. It's just a really careful simplifying of Owen.

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So if you haven't read that book, read it. Chapter 17 is all about these privileges.

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And we've only mentioned a couple, but before we close, I want to remind you, what we're talking about is something that we have objectively in Christ that can't alter, just like the legal adoption doesn't alter with my behavior or the child's behavior.

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But in a day -to -day way, the enjoyment of the impact of that reality is in direct proportion to you believing what scripture says.

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And not just, you know, a vague idea like, oh, all Christians are children of God. Well, yes. But what does that mean?

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And Owen, you know, just breaks up some of these things for us. Start there. Take the verses, and Owen gives so many verses, we wouldn't have the time to even list them.

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Go one at a time and make it a careful study and an object of meditation until that permeates your understanding of yourself, your self -identity.

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God sees me this way. This is a reality. It's not positive thinking, but it's a reality that's to be lived on.

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And to the degree that it grips a believer's mind, to that degree, there is a flow of sweet, sanctifying benefits.

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And all of that was brought to us by being united to the one that took our nature, that identified with our selfish, sinful behavior on the cross, and that was raised for our justification.

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And so, from beginning to end, it is the purest form of grace.

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Well, next week, we're going to finish up our series on union with Christ by looking at what the

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Bible says about union with Christ and the great ending of that, or, you know, the completion of that process, glorification.