SONS AND SLAVES - PART 2

Dearest family,

I know you thought we were through with the parable of the prodigal sons a long time ago in this series, but because you are so familiar with it now, it is a good place to start. They are both sons. Their identity as sons has never been reclassified by the father. It’s how he sees them, how he loves them, how he provides for them. But both of them make equally bad choices in their relationship with the father, and both choose a different persona. Though a son, the younger wanted to be a “hired servant”, the very person that Jesus said could not live in intimacy with the father, or be taken into the father’s confidence. The older brother betrays himself in his angry outburst when he describes his life as “slaving for you”. What this does tell us is that though a son, you can in fact end up living as a slave or a servant, and consequently, you will only see the father from a slave’s or servant’s perspective. There are so many who are called and loved as sons and daughters who are “hardly sons” but in fact living as servants and slaves. Fundamental to all healing and deliverance is the recovery of the assurance of our sonship and God’s fatherhood.

But what about this “hired servant” idea? If you remember, there were three levels of enslavement or service and he happened to choose the best of the three, the one that had a little more give and benefit than the bondsmen and the slaves – but whether you eat cake in prison or dirt, you’re in prison! No matter how you dress up or rationalize your bondage, you’re a slave. You can give slavery a good name if you really work at it. You can try all you want to make it sound good, feel normal, but it’s a world away from being in the father’s embrace and living in the father’s house. Being a son is about being both near and dear. Why this hired-servant thing? Because he believes he has forfeited being a son, by killing the heart of the father. He has believed the lie that he is now excluded from that kind of intimate relationship, or that having once sinned against it, it cannot be recovered. Somehow he still thinks he can make a deal with the father that will at least be better than the slavery of the pig-sty but still some kind of servitude that could never be the sonship that once was. The only thing that could possibly change this for him would be a revelation of the true nature both of fatherhood and sonship – the same way there are thousands sitting in pews who need a revelation of the running father, who is unashamed by the tunic up around his waist, unashamed of the way he is revealing his fatherly needs and passions for the son, welcoming them home again to an experience of sonship, sealing their deliverance from the slavery of that pig-sty, and assuring them that they will never be a slave again to fear and bondage. We have not been healed and delivered from the enslavement of Satan, to become a hired hand for the Father.

Being a hired servant was what the son knew best to be, apart from his father’s grace. But hear me: the love of the father will not allow us to be or become what we are not. In any case, his idea that by working he was somehow going to be able to earn to pay back, or save to recover what was lost, was unattainable, plain impossible. It turns out that just as the father was always the father, so the son, despite all that had happened to disfigure his identity or appear to disbar his sonship, was still a son, was always a son. Maybe a dead son, but still a son and not a servant. Maybe a disobedient son, but still a son and not a servant. Maybe a delinquent son, but still a son and not a servant. The father has no other desire or intention but to have a son: he can raise a dead son, he can restore a disobedient son; he can redeem a delinquent son. So how does the father respond to the son who has chosen to be a hired servant, not a son? He reinstates him to every vestige of sonship: the robe, the ring and the roast.

The older brother was no different. In his anger he exposes himself. “I’ve been slaving for you.” Long before Paul wrote to the Romans or to the Galatians about being slaves again to fear, the contrast between a slave and a true son is presented by Jesus. The two sons are equal in their estrangement from the heart of the father, whether through license or whether through legalism. Here is the tragedy of living in the father’s house as a slave. But it also shows us some of the bad fruits of this slavery, the evidences of this bondage.

As I shared on Sunday, pursuant to the last message I preached in this series, Jesus not only said that he would not leave us as orphans, but that he no longer even called us servants. Furthermore, having said that everyone who sins is a slave to sin, and pointing out that a slave has “no permanent place in the family” (Jn. 8:34-36), Jesus said that if He as the Son set us free we would be free indeed, just as He was as a true son of the Father. How amazing is the Spirit of adoption, but how virulently does the enemy of our souls want to deny us living with the rights of sons, and therefore the inheritance of sons and daughters.

Please find attached the summary of the powerpoints I showed on Sunday, that are Jack Frost’s presentation of some of the major differences between the heart of orphanhood and the heart of sonship. I do so hope that this helps you.

Finding Father together with you my brothers and sisters,

Stuart

http://www.christourshepherd.org/pastlet.htm (and follow links to download MP3 audio of sermon)

SONS AND SLAVES

A PASTORAL LETTER

Dearest family,

As we saw on Sunday from the story of the prodigal sons, before Paul’s expositions in the epistles on sonship and slavery, it is Jesus in this parable who puts in the mouth of the father the words of rebuttal to the slave designation of the sons. The father’s answer is simply: no, you are the heir. “Because you are sons, God sent the spirit of his son into your hearts, the spirit who calls out ‘Abba father’. So you are no longer a slave but a son: and since you are a son, God has made you also an heir.” (Gals. 4:4-7) The father assures the elder brother of the truth about who he is and what his holy rights are as a son, that he does not need to grasp or does not need to fear will be taken or removed. The tragedy is to live as a slave and fail or refuse to avail yourself as a son, of all that is available in the father’s house. He could have had a fatted calf if he had wanted. The fact is, the father had already given it to him by deed and title at the beginning of the story. His blame of the father was therefore shameful, because unfounded, ungrounded, just wrong.

The other thing that the father is so concerned to communicate is that he was always there and available. “My son, you are always with me.” The son could only take himself away from the father. It is the devil’s work to steal and rob and destroy the family of the father. There is no limit to demonic envy and hatred for the intimacy of the father and son/daughter relationship. You see this so deeply in the High Priestly prayer of Jesus in Jn. 17, another crucial passage for understanding the father-son relationship. You can hear echoes of this passage in it. Jesus keeps talking about himself being with the Father “with you” (vs.5); about the Father being in Him and he being “with them” (vs.12) And then of course, this intimacy is expressed as being “in” each other, the only way to express this closeness of paternal DNA. There is nothing more awful that the slave spirit does than impose a distance, an unapproachability with God.

Jesus himself said that he would change slaves into sons. There is a deliverance from slavery, in any of its myriad manifestations, into sonship. Jesus said that he would not leave us as orphans, but send his Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the Father, the Spirit of adoption. We talk a lot about the works of the Holy Spirit, the manifestations of the spirit, but there is none greater than the Spirit’s continual testimony to our spirits: “You are a son of the Father…You are a daughter of the Father…God is your Father… in you he is well pleased…”

There are so many ways and reasons why people who are sons and daughters end up living or choose to live as slaves or orphans in their spiritual identities. We’ve discussed many of them as they relate to the formative effects of human fathering. Fathers who are hard taskmasters not surprisingly impose enslavement upon the spirit. The unbelievable fall-out of parental failure and disappointment and discouragement that creates an orphan spirit that has lost trust in fatherly authority, that has closed the heart in self protection, that sets severe boundaries on relationships and intimacies (but ironically blames others for being unwelcoming or unfriendly) that carries burdens that cannot be shared or cast on another, that chooses to live among the family of God as one who remains homeless, unable to abide, unable to make a place their abode. How raw is the orphan spirit that doesn’t find a place of belonging, that is always on the outside looking in, that ends up always having something to prove. Someone has described Satan as the first spiritual orphan – cast out of heaven his home. Ezekiel says of him, “You were in Eden…on the mount of God.” It is interesting that the demonic envy of that enslaved and orphan spirit paid a visit to a son and a daughter in Eden, that resulted in another banishment from home and the beginning of the story of redemption that is essentially all about recovering us from the slave quarters, from the orphanage, back into the Father’s house.

Your heavenly father cannot bear that you would be a slave or an orphan in any part of your being, in any part of your personhood and identity. For him to be falsely viewed by you through the lens of a servant/slave or an orphan is a grief to his heart, but it won’t stop his loving fatherly pleadings with your spirit. This is why we all need constant experiential encounters with the Holy Spirit. Our understanding of the baptism of the Holy Spirit is often, rightly, associated with the enduement of power. But any suffusion of the Spirit, any infusion of the Spirit, by definition, brings such a boldness, such a liberty, such a recovery of doing the will of the Father and the works of the Son, precisely because it is a spirit of adoption. Peter makes it clear in his Pentecost sermon that the Spirit is “received from the Father”. We are assured afresh about who we are as sons and daughters. Against all the lies and assaults and challenges and pressures and pains and disappointments and failures, the Spirit keeps coming to us, and we keep receiving him as the scripture says, and when we do, two things happen:
1. Roms 8: He testifies with our spirit that we are the children of God. But your spirit has to
make that witness and confession for it to be the duet it is presented as.
2. Galatians 4: From our hearts he calls out in our voice “Abba, Father!”

There is no need to go through another message in this series bearing the spirit of a slave or an orphan in your relationship with God. Would you call Jesus a liar? He said that as the Father loved him, so the Father loved us. I want to encourage you to get as familiar as you can with your Father by calling him so. There is a spiritual power and breakthrough and deliverance from enslavement and orphan-hood when we declare the truth to him about who he is and always has been to us, who have been born again of his spirit, adopted into his family, set free from the slavery of sin to be the sons and daughters of the Father. The Spirit is the spirit of his son, and God the Father will never reject the Spirit of his son; he cannot reject you anymore than he could now reject the glorified Jesus. You see, when you confess the truth of his identity as father, you are equally expressing your identity as a son or a daughter. And you declare that in the face of every counterfeit comfort and false father – you declare it in the face of the fathering of the devil, whose intent is to separate you from the love of the Father. Your adoption is irreversible, and you have the nature of the father, the spirit of the father and all the resources of the father, that give you all the rights and responsibilities of a son.

The cry of “Abba!” doesn’t fit politely into a polished service schedule or an ordered liturgy. It broke from the lips of a suffering Jesus in Gethsemane with guttural and emotional power, with a pained and strained earnestness. It is a cry that is spontaneous, that is confident, that is expressive. Yes our assurance is rooted in our assurance about what scripture teaches us about who we are. Yes, our assurance is rooted in all the personal evidences that we know are the mark of his life within us, like love for the brethren (basically other sons and daughters!) But it is this witness of the Spirit, this stirring, this reception in our hearts of his testimony that we are indeed sons, by the cry, “Abba, father!” that is such an assurance. Slave children never used the word “Abba!” You are not a slave or orphan – so use it!

Pastorally yours,

Stuart

http://www.christourshepherd.org/pastlet.htm (and follow links to download MP3 audio of sermon)