Fundamental Meaning/Significance

Driving home: If you want to judge how well a person understands the Christian faith find out how much he makes of the thought of being God's child and having God as his father.

Martin quotes J.I. Packer's assertions about the centrality of God's fatherhood and being God's child to understanding the Christian faith, using it to underscore the importance of the doctrine of adoption.

In the year 1973 InterVarsity Press published the first edition of a book by Dr. J. I. Packer with the title Knowing God.

3:45 - 3:59 Read in full sermon

Driving home: Paul did not shape the gospel to suit the secular world of his time. It would be mistaken, therefore, to think that he took the Roman legal concept and molded the message of the gospel into it.

He uses the example of expounding Psalm 23 by the Bible's concept of a shepherd, rather than solely by observing modern Middle Eastern shepherds, to illustrate that Paul did not shape the gospel by Roman adoption practices but used them to illustrate a divinely revealed truth.

Let's find all the details of that. Bring it over here and shape the biblical doctrine of adoption according to the Roman practice of adoption. No! That's why you want to beware of these books that say, you want to understand Psalm 23?

20:14 - 20:33 Read in full sermon

Driving home: God doesn't look for worthy people to make his sons. He takes the heirs of hell, sunk in their sins and twits and wretchedness and wickedness and wickedness and determines to make such his sons to magnify as Ephesians 1 …

He explains that in Greco-Roman culture, adoption often involved young or fully matured adults chosen for their worthiness, contrasting this with God's adoption of unworthy sinners to magnify His grace.

Now, very interestingly, generally, in the Greco-Roman world, someone who would adopt a son did not adopt a baby. He would adopt a young adult or a fully matured adult. Often, someone who did not have a son to be his heir or to be the executor of his estate, his affairs, when he stepped out of his sphere of ordinary labor. Therefore, he would look to the character, to the proven abilities.

24:10 - 24:40 Read in full sermon

Driving home: Then, the family ties of your old family have been radically and permanently severed.

He uses the analogy of only two kinds of people in the world (children of God and children of the devil), more significant than male and female, to emphasize the radical spiritual division adoption creates.

and verse 10, John writes, In this, the children of God are manifested and the children of the kinds of people in the whole world, from the South Pole to the North, West and West to East, children of the world. Here this morning, only two kinds of people. Yes, males and females. We don't have any androgynous people here.

27:51 - 28:36 Read in full sermon

The point: Be able to say with biblical intelligence, 'I'm an adopted son/daughter,' understanding the legal transaction and new relationships.

He uses the analogy of a justified person looking in the mirror and declaring their justified status despite physical imperfections, to encourage believers to similarly declare their adopted status with biblical intelligence.

And I have been given rights and responsibilities in that relationship. Just as I trust you have a clear understanding now of what it means to be justified, to have your sins forgiven, to have a perfect standing before the Lord, to have your law credited to you because of your union with Christ, that you can get up tomorrow morning and say with biblical intelligence when you look in the mirror, in spite of what I see in that mirror that ain't very pretty, in spite of what I know that's underneath the skin and face and stroogly hair, as the Pennsylvania Dutch would call what you have in the mor...

47:02 - 47:44 Read in full sermon