The Heart of the Good News

This sermon is from Grace Fellowship Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. To access other sermons or to learn more about us, please visit our website at graceedmonton .ca.

Why Adoption Is the Heart of the Gospel

I want to posit to you a hypothetical scenario in which I would choose among one of you, and I'm not sure who I would pick, but I would ask you to come up to the front here and to describe to everybody your understanding of the message of Christianity in 60 seconds or less.

It's quite a task, isn't it? But I'm not going to ask you to do this. But I just want to get your minds thinking about how you would distill the message of Christianity down into a bite-sized chunk that an unbeliever could understand it.

Of all the works that Jesus did, it says the whole world could not contain all the books of the things that he did. So what would you include? What would make the cut if you only had that short of time?

And people have attempted to do exactly that thing when they wrote gospel tracts, and I brought a number of them with me here. I have seven different gospel tracts that Lowell and the gang like to use, right, when you do your evangelism.

And there was a great variety in these tracts when I was looking through them. The approaches in them is all different, but yet all of them have two consistent things that make up and are essential to every gospel presentation.

They had, on the one hand, they talked about the blessings that we have in Christ, those things that Christ did for us that make good news truly good news. And then, on the other hand, the other component is they talked about the ground of that blessing.

So those two things come together to make good news truly good. And I think that does make sense when we think about it. Say if I were to take out some keys and say, great news, there's a brand new car parked out here, and it's all yours.

And then you'd be thinking, well that is great news, but then I don't actually have the title to that car, and it's actually not in my possession to give. Well, then the good news just falls apart. On the other hand, if I say, hey, great news, I've got a brand new car up there.

I just bought it. I have the title. It's all mine. And then I just dangle the keys in front of me and say, look at that. And then you'd be thinking, well, that's great, but it's really not that good news for me, is it?

So you need both of these things coming together. And that helps us to think of what the gospel message would consist of. So you can come to a passage like it speaks of in the New Testament, speaking of Abraham.

It says, the gospel was preached to Abraham, saying, in you shall all the nations of the earth be blessed. And then you're thinking, well, where is Christ in there and Christ on the cross? But that's included in these two things, the blessing, the blessing of salvation, which is inherent in that word, but in Christ.

And something similar could be said of when the person asks, what must I do to be saved? Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved. Both the blessing and Jesus Christ, who is the one who makes that blessing possible.

And so back to these tracts here. They all have these two components to them. They are all true gospel messages, though their methods vary greatly. And when it came to the ground of the blessing, that is, Jesus Christ on the cross and what he accomplished there, they were all remarkably consistent, and he did a very excellent job of describing these things.

But what I found when I was looking through these tracts, when it came to the part about the blessings that we have, they had quite a variety. They kind of started off with some common themes. And when I went through them, I listed all the blessings I could find, gospel blessings in there.

And there are three of them that are common that stood up at the top. They spoke of the forgiveness of sins. And I think every tract had that component in there. They spoke of salvation. And the other thing was eternal life.

But beyond these three things, they diverged greatly. For example, in one of them, it described the peace of Christ that is given to us. And when I was looking through these tracts, it wasn't just at random.

I was looking for something very specific, a particular blessing, our topic today, adopted, being born into God's family, to see what they said about that. And I found one single tract among this pile up here of seven tracts that even mentioned adoption.

Because it brought up the Bible verse that had it in there. Now, if I were an unbeliever and reading through these tracts, or if you were and reading through these tracts, I think you would get the impression that being adopted by God is maybe not the most fundamental blessing of the gospel, but something maybe subsidiary, a little bit lower down.

And with that in view, I want to read for you just a few quotes of some authors that you'll be, many of you, familiar with. So just put those tracts just in the back of your mind now. Listen to this. This is John Owen, speaking of adoption.

He said, Adoption is our fountain of privilege. John Murray said, Adoption is the apex of redemptive grace and privilege. Here we have the ultimate source and the highest privilege brought together. Martin Lloyd-Jones said, Adoption is the final and ultimate end of redemption.

There is nothing higher than this. Our adoption is the highest expression even of God's love. Here's a quote by J .I. Packer. You sum up the whole of New Testament teaching in a single phrase if you speak of it as a revelation of the fatherhood of the Holy Creator.

In the same way, you sum up the whole of New Testament religion if you describe it as the knowledge of God as one's Holy Father. If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God's child and having God as his father.

If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means that he does not understand Christianity very well at all. For everything that Christ taught, everything that makes the New Testament new and better than the old, everything that is distinctively Christian as opposed to merely Jewish is summed up in the knowledge of the fatherhood of God.

Father is the Christian name for God. Our understanding of Christianity cannot be better than our grasp of adoption. Now, these tracks here, this one maybe has a little bit of an edge because it's got a few more pages to include something like that.

But listen to another quote by J .I. Packer when he reduces it not just down to a paragraph, but the message of Christianity in just three words. He said, where I asked to focus the New Testament message in three words, my proposal would be adoption through propitiation.

And I do not expect ever to be a richer and more pregnant summary of the gospel than that. So when we have these tracks saying this one thing on the one hand and these authors here talking about adoption the way they do on the other hand, there is a great disparity, isn't there, on the central message of Christianity.

And the reason I'm bringing all this up is not so that we would maybe tweak the tracks that we use or think about how we share the gospel with unbelievers. But what I'm interested in is your own hearts and what place is in your hearts of being a son of God.

How do you most often refer to God? Do you simply say God? Or maybe the Lord? Or maybe the Lord God? But in addition to these titles and all the wonderful names of God that are in the Bible, do you have in your vocabulary when you refer to God his Christian name, Father?

Well, I'm going to deliver to you a message today, a gospel message. And it may be a little bit different of a gospel message than you're used to hearing. It may not follow the same structure, but it will have the two crucial components that I was speaking of earlier.

And then at the end of the gospel presentation, I will ask for a fitting response, which is usually accompanied by a gospel presentation, to respond to it a certain way. But this is a gospel message for believers, because I trust most of us here are Christians and we're believers.

And as Paul was writing to the Ephesians, he was writing to believers, to the saints who are in Ephesus and the faithful in Christ Jesus. And then he goes on, verses 3 to 14, to give a gospel message.

I don't know if you've ever thought about these verses that way, but in almost every one of them could be almost taken as a stand-alone gospel message, including the great blessings that we have in Christ, based upon the foundation of Christ himself.

And so our text today, Ephesians 1, verses 5 to 6, I'll be speaking just what the text is talking about here, about the blessing of adoption through Christ, through the beloved, and then asking for an appropriate response, which in this case will be to the praise of his glorious grace.

So what I would like to do now is let's read the text, and then we will pray. Ephesians 1, verses 5 and 6. In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons, through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the beloved.

Our Former Condition Without God

Now, were I to, if we want to, the first thing I want to talk about, if we were to understand the gospel, and appreciate it more fully, more completely, then we may praise God as we ought to. The first thing we need to understand is that there was a time in our lives when we were not children of God.

And this is implied plainly in Paul's use of the word adoption, because people don't adopt people who are already their sons. So we were not children of God. If you flip over to Ephesians chapter 2, starting in verse 11, it says,.

Therefore remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called the uncircumcision by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands, remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.

And I think I need to stress the point that we were without God and not children, because of the tendency in our society, at least among those who still call themselves theists, to think of all of humanity somehow as if we were all God's children.

Just inherent by birth. And just think of how this idea can just be imbibed into our own thinking. The parable of the prodigal son we use, and that's my favorite parable. But we like to think of ourselves as that wayward son who is returning home to his father, don't we?

And the father was taking him home again. But that parable, like all parables, was meant to convey one primary idea that Jesus was getting across. In that case, he was dealing with the older brother and saying something to the nation of Israel.

However, there are many parallels in these parables that we can draw from. But when it comes to the parable of the prodigal son, we never had that claim that the prodigal son had when he came home to his father.

We were never God's sons. And just looking around at you, I want to make this more personal. Because when we hear of those things, that we were not the sons of God, we tend to think of it just out there somewhere, in general.

That no one was God's sons, but you, every one of you, were without God, and you were without hope. That was true of every one of you. And not only were you in that condition without God, but you had no sense to return.

You were not like the prodigal son who could come to his senses and say, I will return to my father. But you were hopelessly lost. And I just think of the way that people in this world are lost without hope.

And you can see it at times when it just hits you a little bit more than others. Like when you're driving down the road and you see the cars driving by you, and you are happy that you are a Christian, but you look at a car going by, and there's perhaps a family there, with a whole history of relationships and ties and life experiences, just in a split second, and another one goes by, and another one goes by.

And then realizing that the vast majority of these people are lost, and hopelessly lost. That was our condition. Think of the way when you go evangelizing and handing out tracts, the way that message is received.

Most people will not even just discard the tract and not read it. But some are just disgusted by the thought of it. Right? I don't need that. I don't need that. Get away from me. It's that utterly hopeless condition.

And I think about my own life before I became a Christian. The fact of this hopelessness. I recall having a poster that I had stuck to my fridge. And this was before I was a Christian. And I really don't know why I put it up there.

It had a Bible text on the bottom. I was just drawn to the artwork on it. Because it had on the one side, these vast red colors, and flames on it, depicting an image of hell. And with that on the horizon, you see a mass of people walking toward that destination.

And the poster was cut in half like this. And on the other side, there was bright skies and green fields, leading up to a city on the horizon. And there are a few people walking along that path. And then you have the Bible text right at the bottom, where it says, enter in at the straight gate.

For wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leads to destruction. And many there be which go in there. Because straight is the gate, and narrow is the way, that leads to life. And few there be that find it.

And I had this poster taped to my beer fridge, next to a bunch of other posters that I'm now ashamed of, having this message before me, and being completely unaffected by this truth. And you think about the lostness of people, what Satan has done to humanity, what Satan has done to us and to you and to me, through the hardness of our own hearts, to twist and to darken, that we cannot even comprehend the goodness of God anymore, and have come to think of this world as our home.

We were hopelessly lost. You were hopelessly lost. And it's worse than that, because you were enemies with God. Again in Ephesians 2 verses 1 to 3,. And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived, in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.

So if we want to use the picture of the prodigal son, and that imagery, I would suggest a more accurate way of thinking would be this. The father of the prodigal, instead of looking out and seeing his wayward son returning to him, instead it would be like the prodigal son's father, coming home to his house, maybe after a long day of work in the field.

And then as he's approaching his house, he sees the door is opened a little bit, and next to the door, a window smashed. And as he comes closer to investigate the scenario, what he discovers is that there is a thief inside there, who is breaking up his house and carrying away his goods.

That is the picture of how God found us. And that's how we would have remained were it not for one thing, the intervention of God, who sent Jesus Christ on a rescue mission. And this was manifested, the love of God, that Jesus Christ came to die for us.

And what does it mean that Jesus Christ died for us? Well, on that cross, 2 ,000 years ago, when Jesus hung there, he was taking care of, for us, two fundamental problems that we had gotten ourselves into in our sin.

We had a bad record because of the sins that we had accrued in our disobedience to our creator. And Jesus dealt with those when he paid for those sins on the cross. And he took his own righteousness that he had lived and counted that as ours.

And we call that justification. But the other problem that he took care of was our bad heart, that desire and inclination towards God that did not savour God and did not trust in God. And God gave us a new heart and made us new creations.

And we call that regeneration. And in Ezekiel it says,. And then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean. From all your idleness and from all your filthiness will I cleanse you. A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you.

Justification, Regeneration, and Being Brought to God

And I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh. Now if that were the extent and sum total of the good news of Christianity, that would be the most amazing news for us.

We're awaiting condemnation. We would be thrilled at that news. But what I would ask is that, would you be satisfied? And you're thinking perhaps, well of course I'd be satisfied. That's wonderful news.

But do you remember the time that Absalom, King David's son, after he had slain his step-brother and he took off for a while, David forgave him, didn't he? And he brought him back. And he was reconciled and had peace with David, his father.

But he was not permitted to see his face at that point. And that brought a great disturbance to Absalom. Even though Absalom had a certain disdain for David, and later sought to kill him. But now if we were given these wonderful graces of justification and regeneration, and that were the end of it, could we be satisfied?

If we were to stand before Jesus Christ, and he would pronounce to us and say, all your sins toward me have been forgiven. Your sins toward God have been forgiven. They will not be held to your account any longer.

Moreover, I will count you as positively righteous in my sight. And not only that, I will take that stony heart.

From you,.

And I will give you a righteous heart that loves righteousness. And then he says to you that, know this, that from this day henceforth you will see my face no more. And then he proceeds to step down the throne and to turn his back on you as you see the Lord of Glory walking away from you and disappearing out of your sight.

Could you be satisfied as the light of the world is departing from you forever? Would you not want to say, wait, wait, could you be satisfied? Well, I suggest that a gospel message that includes forgiveness, even justification, even if it includes being made an heir of the world, even if it includes living forever, if it shuts you out from the light and from that time you abide in darkness, the description of that good news is more akin to a picture of hell than it is to the glorious gospel.

If your conception of the gospel is forgiveness merely and regeneration merely, have you truly understood what it is that makes the good news good news? Well, God has not stopped there. In 1 Peter 3 .18, it says this,.

For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God. And now this is something that you can you can lay your hat on, that you can sink your heart into and rejoice at this fact, to be brought unto God.

Now with news like that, we would be like the angels of heaven, rejoicing in the presence of God. We can thank Him for our salvation, see what God is doing, all that He is up to, and be able to praise Him like that forever.

But even still,.

I would suggest to you, at that point, everything I've been saying so far, all these blessings, including being brought unto God, including all these other things, of being made an heir of the world and everything else, all these things together are still, we're just still playing around in the shallows of the gospel, splashing around.

Up to our ankles,.

When God means to bring us into the depths of what the gospel truly is. And what do I mean when I'm talking about the depths of the gospel? Well, what I mean is what the Apostle John spoke of. I'll just read it to you.

This wonderful blessing, just let it sink down into your ears.

John 1 -9.

The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, yet the world did not know Him.

He came to His own,.

And His own people did not receive Him. But to all who did receive Him, who believed in His name, He gave the right to become the children of God, to become a child of God is a blessing so surpassing these other things that John could hardly speak of it.

Behold what manner of love it is that we should be called the children of God. Well, so what is, what is adoption? And there's so much that we could speak of it, but I would like to bring to you four different considerations, four characteristics about adoption, just for us to meditate on, that we may be able to appreciate it more fully.

The Personal and Eschatological Nature of Adoption

And the first thing I'd like us to consider about adoption.

Is the idea that it's an.

Intensely personal relationship with God. I can sympathize with the idea that we just have the vaguest notion of what it is to be a child of God. We don't really know what that is exactly. But we must remember that all of us who have been born again are just like babies in the Lord.

Even the most mature believer who has lived decades in the faith, when they die, they're just a baby in Christ. And you think about babies, the way that they are held, and we had the experience of being able to enjoy that recently.

A newborn baby,.

How they perceive the person who's holding them. I think they can sense that they're being held, and they look up at you, and they perceive that there's some person in front of them, yet they don't have the kind of granular detail, I think, to make out the face.

You can just, I think, tell by the blank kind of stare that they have on their face as they just take in and absorb. And I think that's kind of like what we are when we perceive God as our Father. The relationship is all there.

The privilege, everything is all there. But we just have maybe the vague notion of it at times. But every once in a while,.

Have you not found,.

Through the Spirit that has been given unto you, that you get little glimpses of God as your Father? I think for many of us, maybe it's the most brightly illuminated for us at the time of our conversion.

Consider the time when you first came to know God, and the way you could see God working in your heart, turning you from the power of Satan to darkness. On you individually, as God was in you, and got a hold of your heart, and began to carry you as a father.

Well, that's the first thing, that this relationship is a very close personal relationship. The next thing to observe about adoption is that there's a time coming when this vague kind of fuzziness that we have will be cleared up, and that will happen at the time of the resurrection.

It's said that it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when He appears, when Jesus Christ appears, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. It says also that now we see through a mirror dimly, but then face to face.

And this great hope we have, when we consider what change is going to occur at that moment, is going to be such a drastic change from what we now experience, that the Apostle Paul can call that very moment of the resurrection our adoption.

He speaks of it that way in Romans chapter 8. So marked will be the contrast, that though technically we are adopted at the moment of conversion, that we will have our eyes opened to the fact that He is our Father.

All the world will be declared that we are His children. God will show Himself to be our Father, and at that moment, you could say, is the start, truly, of our life as the sons of God. And we have that hope to look forward to.

And a third characteristic is that God is going to show to us the riches of His grace for all of eternity. Back in Ephesians 2 again, and we have so much good stuff to look forward to yet in this epistle to the Ephesians.

Well, Ephesians 2 verse 6. And He raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages He might show the immeasurable riches of His grace and His kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

So here, what I want to point out is not the fact simply that we'll live forever, but that we'll live forever in a condition of God showing these things to us. God showing His riches of His grace toward us.

Because every day in eternity, there's just one more day of grace, a gift as the fruit of Christ's work in His life and death. And this is something to look forward to, because when we consider the world and we look at the vast creation God has made,.

I mean, we looked...

Scott showed me some videos of these birds, just simple birds. Take one animal of God's creation. The variety, just from one to the next, and these colors. God is not just creative, but He creates beauty.

And He says, I want light. And He scatters the stars. And this present world that we are living in right now, He describes simply as an old, worn-out, and dirty garment that He's just going to change.

And what must it be like when He really puts His heart to something and shows that to us? There will be no end to what He can show to us. I think that's evidenced in the way we just see the way He creates.

There's no limit. I do have another thing, another characteristic about this adoption I'd like to share. And that is this, that this is a close and intimate relationship, but not only is it a close relationship, but think about this.

This is the most closest relationship that a created being can ever have to the Almighty God. There is nothing that even God Himself can conceive of, of any creature having a closer relationship with Him than what we now enjoy.

Though we only see it in part. His love, for example. There's no possible way that He could create a creature that He loves more. His love toward us. He gives it all to us. To which of the angels was it ever said, I will love them as I love my only son?

Or to which of the angels did God ever say, I will dwell in them, and they in me? Adoption changes everything. When you became converted, it's not like the idea that some people have when they say, just try Christ.

It's not like you can taste Christ a little bit and then step back again. And it reminds me of a song that I like listening to. This Christian singer and songwriter speaks of her folly in thinking that she could just dip her feet in when she approaches God.

She says, I was a fool. You came like a torrent and swept me away. She said, there's no going back. Nothing will ever be the same again. When you were converted, everything changed. Your course of life for eternity altered.

Forever.

And God wants to take you in and through the ages to show these riches to you. You are a vessel of grace. God's abundant grace. His most glorious attribute. He's pouring forth into you like no other creature.

The angels cannot appreciate grace like we will be able to. That is a privilege reserved only for his sons. The highest privilege of any created being is yours. And God, your father, is delighted to show this to you.

Adoption is the very heart of the gospel. It's not a subsidiary blessing. Whilst having been declared to be the good news of what it is that Christ brought to us, there's only one fitting response, and that is praise to his glorious grace.

I remember a time a few years back, and I was driving this full-size van, and it had a big banner across the top, big block letters, probably like that, and right across the whole windshield, it says, Praise the Lord.

And I remember driving this van on my way to work, and it was a borrowed van, and I remember the feeling of driving this thing, it just attracts attention wherever you go. You can probably see this from half a block away, and I'm thinking, this does not feel like me.

Because I don't even like to have even the tiniest little bumper sticker on my car with any kind of message at all. I'm a little bit more reticent with my feelings and opinions, and I was thinking, this is not me.

And so that was interesting. But it was not until just recently, I was looking back on that time, and I'm thinking, well, is that true? That is not me. For not only me, but all of you, you were born to praise him.

That's what you were made for. To praise God, he's glorifying him. That's what you were created for. To enjoy his goodness toward you. But not only were you born for this, you could say it's your destiny, or if you don't like the word destiny, let's make it a little Christian here, let's call it predestined.

You were predestined for this. That's what it says in our text, in Ephesians.

Not only that,.

But you were made to praise God in a unique way, like no other Christian can praise him. He came to you, each of you, in an individual way, didn't he? And think about the great variety of the way God came to us, from all different walks of life, in all different ways, and showed himself to you in a little bit of a unique way from anyone else.

Well, you were made to praise him in just the way that God has saved you. Just according to that grace that he has shown you. And you were meant to display that praise together with all the rest of the trophies of God's grace in the kingdom of God, in the family of God.

That's what it is to be adopted. Have not only God as your father, but to be his children with the household of God, with Jesus Christ, our older brother and kinsman redeemer, our lord, our saviour. How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that brings good tidings.

But Jesus Christ, what he accomplished for us, God, to endear our hearts to him, he's the source of all the grace that for the ages will be heaped down upon us. And we're all to praise him in that unique, individual way.

I don't know if any of you have ever been to a symphony. It's a nice experience.

If you haven't been,.

Let me just enjoy or share with you just a little bit of what it's like. Because my favorite part is when you first get there in the auditorium and you made your way to your seat and all the musicians there are there on the stage with all the different types of instruments.

And all that they're doing at first is just warming themselves up, warming up the instruments, getting them into tune. And even that is quite something to hear. All of the variety of the sounds from the sounds of the violins and the cellos.

To the.

Clashing of the cymbals. I like the guy particularly who hits the drum. Just the bellowing sound that comes out of that thing is quite impressive. Or even just the guy who hits the tinkles on the little triangle.

He has his part too.

And then you have.

The brass section. There's nothing like a trumpet to just put forth such a triumphant sound. Or the more delicate sounds of the lute and the harp. But the moment that I most appreciate, I don't know about you, but when the conductor makes his appearance and then he stands up.

And then when he lifts his hands.

And he holds with his stick, or whatever you call that thing, at that moment.

All the musicians.

Calm down and there's a hush. And then in that silence, when he lifts.

Up his hands.

The music just pours.

Forth.

And it's like the air is thick of music to your ears. Each of these instruments,.

All unique,.