Series

I was once an orphan. I lived in poverty and danger on the inner-city streets of Edmonton . One day, when I was four, a kind man saved me from my life on the streets, and adopted me as his own. My new father was upper, upper class, which meant we were very wealthy, so wealthy that we could afford many luxuries including a nanny to look after me. My father was a kind and good man who took very good care of our nanny. She lived a high life, well paid, well cared for.

As I grew up, around the age of 12 or 13, I began to realize that I would one day inherit a vast fortune. I began to look down my nose at my nanny, and everyone else for that matter, because my nanny and people like her were not chosen sons. I despised my nanny for a number of reasons: she was a woman, I was a man; she was an employee, I was family; she was Asian, I was Caucasian. I became cocky, arrogant and proud.

I didn’t appreciate the fact that everything I had was a product of the grace of my father. I began also to despise my father’s way of life. I hated his rules. I felt boxed in and limited. I didn’t see that my father’s rules were actually there to protect me. So when I was about 17 or 18, I began to turn my back on my father. Though I knew he loved me, I didn’t want his way of life. So I walked away from my dad, longing for a life of freedom. However that dream of independence would soon turn into a nightmare of self-destruction. The same streets that my father plucked me out of and saved me from as a child, were the ones I went back to.

In order to support my addictive behavior, I began to steal. My stealing got me involved in the wrong crowd, and I began to spiral downhill into a life of crime and violence on the mean streets of Edmonton .

I want you to know that even though I turned my back on my father, not once did my father ever stop loving me. You could say that I was chosen and elected, but my heart hadn’t changed. I hurt him, but he loved me no matter what.

Do you want to know how I know that? You see my father had another son. Only this son wasn’t adopted, he has always been my father’s son. He is, you could say, a son by nature. Or, as one man once said, “the only begotten son.” Which really means, ‘One of a Kind’.

While I was at the very bottom of the pit I had dug for myself, my father sent his one of a kind son to come and find me, and rescue me. And so my older brother left my father’s mansion, left the suburbs, and came to live in skid row in order to find me. And in the process of finding me, and saving me, the very people who I’d been living with, brutally murdered him. My brother died for me.

It wasn’t until I realized that my father expressed his love for me in the death of my brother that my heart really began to change. And it did. My father’s love caused me to be born again. My way of life changed, and I began not only to love my father, but the amazing thing was that his love in me enabled me to love other people. Realizing that I didn’t deserve my father’s love, that it was all grace, really emptied me of the pride I had. Oh yes, I still struggle with pride, but all those old distinctions of race, gender, and class are now a part of my old life. I now love my nanny. My father’s love not only reconciled me to him, and I needed to be reconciled to him, my father’s love reconciled me to her, to you. What I see now, in God’s family there are only sons and daughters.

The story I just told you is an illustration of our text today. It is also the story of ancient

Israel

. As God’s chosen people, they rebelled, turned their backs on God, their father, and lived as slaves to sin. But God, the father, did not stop loving them. Instead, as the scriptures tell us, “he loved them so much that he sent his one and only son to die, and that anyone who believed in his one and only son, would never parish, but live forever in his mansion.”(John 3:16, paraphrase mine).

The story I just told you is my story. Indeed, it is your story (if you have made a decision by faith to accept God’s gift of grace, Jesus, as your savior). The story I just told you was also the Galatians’ story. It was the very story that the Judaizers were trying to get them to forget; trying to convince them wasn’t the complete story. They were saying, “Listen you Galatians, all this talk about equality, about the gospel being enough, is really only part of the story. To really be good in the eyes of God, you got to be Jewish because we Jews are the cream of the crop, the apple of God’s eye, his special people. We look down on everyone who isn’t Jewish, so if you want to be close with God, you better become Jewish.”

However, what Paul is telling the Galatians in the text this morning, and indeed what he is telling us, is that in God’s family there are no slaves, there are no gender barriers, there are no racial barriers. All are equal. All who belong to Jesus through faith in the gospel are His children! “You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourself—not as a Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female—but with Christ…all are one in Christ Jesus” (3:26-27, paraphrase mine).

You’ve heard me speak a lot about us in this fellowship moving toward deeper, more biblical community here at Zion . That requires us to move towards being more vulnerable, more trusting, more forgiving of one another. Indeed more loving of one another.

The Bible tells us to “love our neighbor as ourselves”(Mark 12:31 ). And we try, and sometimes it works. But, as it can be with me, it’s often a conditional, guarded, sometimes suspicious, rarely reckless love of neighbor. This is not the sort of love Jesus was talking about when he said love your neighbor. Jesus was urging us to love unconditionally, freely, and recklessly. Why is it, then, that it doesn’t often look like that?

I want to suggest to you this morning, and this is the big idea today: Sonship precedes brotherhood. Sonship precedes brotherhood. In other words, before we can love our neighbor, or love each other, we must believe that God the Father loves us. We must first live as Children of God the Father before we can live to love one another as brothers and sisters (neighbors). The degree to which we are able to confess sin and live forgiven and forgiving depends on how we see God. In fact our ability to love, to give, to respect each other reflects what we believe about God’s love for us. The way we believe about God is the way we will live.

Doubting the love, forgiveness and grace of God the Father means doubting the love, forgiveness and grace of others. That is why Sonship comes before brotherhood.

Before we go on this morning, I want to take a brief timeout. For about half of you in this room, an obvious question arises when you hear what Paul writes in this text. For anyone who is a female here today and hears the words Paul speaks, the obvious question has to be: why would Paul only speak of sons? Why such a male oriented message?

Did you know that many women who have read these words of Paul have rejected the gospel, and refused to become Christian? Modern feminists read this and say, “Clearly Christianity is a male only faith.” And this is a great tragedy isn’t it? They’re missing out. If they only read verse 26 of chapter 3, yes, they could be left unaware. But anyone who reads the Bible with an open mind, and a desire to go deeper, sees very quickly that Paul proclaims gender equality when it comes to God’s love.

Can I assume this morning that the ladies here believe that God loves you equally as much as he does the men? Good!

So why doesn’t Paul use gender-neutral language in this text? As a Jew, Paul is writing in the midst of a patriarchal society, meaning male dominant. Men ruled; only sons were heirs to the father’s inheritance, men were superior to women.

When we read this text we want to change the language, to make it sons’ and daughters’, or ‘children’, but if we do, we take the teeth out of Paul’s argument, for this is Paul turning the patriarchal way of life on its head!

What Paul is saying here is that if you believe in Jesus, if you have chosen to follow Jesus for your life, you are equal! Even though you are a daughter, you have the same rights as the firstborn son! This is Paul exalting women!

Paul’s not blurring the gender roles. He is saying that yes, men and women are different, physically, emotionally, but here he’s thumping all cultural barriers. In Christ, racial, gender and class barriers are thrown down! All are one in the body of Christ!

This is very important to the Galatian Christians who have been led to believe that in order to be truly accepted, they had to become Jews! The Judaizer’s teaching was a disaster for Galatian women because it meant then that they were on the outside looking in. Paul’s teaching here is clear: You are not valued based on human barriers. You are all sons, and daughters, of God because of your faith in Jesus Christ. As a result, you are all heirs, equal and exalted!

We as Christians are the Father’s ambassadors of love. But what keeps us as Christians from loving one another and our neighbor recklessly, and taking more risks of love more often? Why instead do we fight intimacy and vulnerability, and reject deeper relationship with one another?

I think it comes down to what we believe. A friend of mine said recently, “What you believe is how you’ll live.” He said if you believe that if you step on a crack you’ll break your mother’s back, you’d never step on a crack! If you believe that Friday the 13^th is really a day filled with bad luck and ominous signs of doom, you’d walk around all day with your head down and your eyes on the lookout for trouble. Bad thinking, leads to bad living.

The same principal applies to how we live as Children of God. If we see God as meanspirited and unforgiving, our lives will reflect that. If we see God as a stingy, miserly father, we’ll live stingy and miserly. If we believe that God waits for us to perform well before he’s happy with us, we’ll live without grace. If we see God as unforgiving, we’ll both stop confessing our sin, and stop receiving forgiveness and therefore we’ll stop forgiving others.

What does the Bible tell us about God’s character? The Bible describes God as One who loves, One who forgives, One who loves recklessly. Indeed our text this morning reminds us of The God who loved his children so much that he gave his one and only son as a way to bring us adopted kids back to him. The Bible tells of a God who loves as the perfect father. What’s more, the Bible tells us of a God who has made it possible for his children to have an intimate, secure relationship with him.

Galatians 4:6 says, “Because you are sons and daughters, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, ‘Abba, Father.’

The cross reference with Galatians 4:6 is Romans 8: 15 which says, “For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship. And by him we cry, ‘Abba, father.’” Spirit of Sonship

Abba is an Aramaic word. Aramaic is the language of first-century Palestine and the native speech of Jesus. Abba means Father, but in a colloquial, intimate sense. The nearest equivalent in our language is Daddy, or perhaps Papa.[ii] Abba reflects a deep intimacy and tender affection between father and child.

In Galatians and Romans, Paul tells us that the Holy Spirit of Jesus in us brings us to an intimate and secure relationship with God the Father, we can call ‘Abba, Father.’ The Holy Spirit testifies that we are God’s children!

No other world religion has an Abba experience—no other world religion makes possible the sort of undreamed of, unimagined intimacy and security in God the Father. Islam doesn’t. Hinduism doesn’t. Buddhism doesn’t. Only Christianity tells of a God who loves his people intimately, as a Father.

Before we can live as brother/neighbor, we need to come to a place of an Abba experience with God the Father. Jesus had an Abba experience: At his baptism, when Jesus came up out of the water, a voice from heaven spoke, ‘this is my son whom I love, with him I am well pleased.’ Throughout his ministry on earth Jesus most often referred to God as “Abba”. His relationship with God was one of deep security and intimacy. His relationship describes the sort of relationship we, as God’s adopted children, can have with God the Father.

The only image we have of our heavenly father is of our own earthly father. Using this will lead, always, to a breakdown of whom God the Father is. Our earthly fathers and mothers loved us imperfectly. Even parents who have been supportive and nurturing to us loved us imperfectly.

The image of God the Father is harder to imagine, though, for those of you who grew up with abusive parents.

Some of your fathers and mothers abused you. Your parents abandoned some of you. Some of you lived, and still live, under the weight of unreasonable expectations placed on you by your parents. Some of your parents couldn’t keep their marriage together and used you to dump on. Some of your parents worshipped you. You could do no wrong, your value depended on what you could do, how well you performed. As long as you presented well, things were good…but it was never enough. With these images of ‘Father’ rolling around in your memory bank, and playing out in your day-to-day experience, it seems almost ridiculous to think of God as loving father.

However, I want you to know, the Holy Spirit wants you to know, that there are no earthly metaphors or comparisons that adequately describe the heavenly Father’s love for us. Our earthly parents, good or bad, love us imperfectly, they cannot provide a true reflection of God the Father. Nothing we know of here on earth compares. The only way we can know what the love of God the Father is like is by divine revelation

How much do you love me, Father? I have already told you, my beloved child, look at the cross. (John 3:16)

Revelation of the Holy Spirit of the fact that you are unconditionally loved by the Father—unconditionally loved! This must be experienced.

But you ask, “Don’t we all have the Holy Spirit the moment we become Christians? Isn’t that what you’ve been preaching all these weeks, cross and Spirit? Yes. Yes that is true. However, the Holy Spirit can be quenched, it can be grieved. It is quenched and grieved when, among other things, we live as though we are not radically and recklessly loved by God the Father.

Baptists have been long criticized for being full of knowledge but lacking in passion. I think it’s a fair criticism. Our strength is also our weakness. Though we generally have a good sense of doctrine, theology and history, there is a tendency to ignore the power, passion, recklessness and spontaneity of the Holy Spirit. This will, and does, inhibit our ability to see God as Father, God as ‘Abba Father’. This will, and does, hinder our ability to live freely as God wants us to live.

We must be people who hold fast to the Bible’s teaching, and to the study of theology and doctrine. We look to the cross, and say ‘thanks be to God for loving us so much that you gave your son’. But we must be people of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit wants to do things in our life as Church, and your life as child that we never thought possible. If we doubt that, we doubt the very foundation of what it means to be Christian.

The Holy Spirit wants to heal you, he wants to bring you to a place of freedom, and he wants to love you recklessly. Why? Because the very Spirit of which I speak is none other than the Spirit of Jesus himself, and Jesus is nothing if not passionate, joy-filled, grace filled, mercy filled, recklessly loving, and recklessly loved by His father…who is also our father. Whatever you like about Jesus, you’ll find in the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit makes known to us the person and character of Jesus. And because Jesus is who he says he is, and because the Holy Spirit is the very nature of Jesus himself poured into us, you can be healed from years and years of bitterness and hurt. You can be set free from disbelief to live and to love recklessly.

NOTES

[i] Preaching, one said, is thieving. Hyperbolic to be sure, the point is well taken. Preaching may not be thieving, but it often involves borrowing liberally from the neighbor’s pantry. This modern parable comes from the sermon, “The Abba Experience”, from the series, CRUX: Coming Back to the Heart of the Gospel (Pastor Brian Buhler, North Shore Alliance Church , North Vancouver , Canada , December 2001). Brian gave me permission to use his material as I see fit, even doing so without giving credit. I am grateful to him for his generosity, and will continue to use his stuff. However, it needs to be made clear that Brian’s work on the book of Galatians has brought me face to face with the “crux” of the gospel, the freedom that comes from being saved by grace and alive by the Spirit. It is my prayer that all who read/hear my messages, would likewise experience the cross and the Spirit.

[ii]Eugene Peterson, Traveling Light (Colorado Springs: Helmers & Howard, 1988) 117.

Zion Baptist Church

Edmonton , Alberta

Series: “Traveling Light” (GALATIANS)

The Gift of Abba

Galatians 3:26-4:7

October 13, 2002

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