INCLUDES THE FOLLOWING ARTICLES:
- God Desired Us To Be Holy And Without Fault In His Eyes
- God Wanted to Adopt You Into HIs Family, Giving Him Great Pleasure
Don’t forget also to read if you haven’t: Do You Experience Love From Your Father?
Introduction:
Justification and adoption are indispensable aspects of our identity in Christ, demonstrating God’s perfect grace and love toward us. Justification deals with our legal standing before God, whereas adoption talks about our intimate relationship with Him as His beloved children. Both happen as a person becomes a Christian, as justification enables adoption to occur.
Key Passage of Both Articles:
“All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms because we are united with Christ. Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes. God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure. So we praise God for the glorious grace he has poured out on us who belong to his dear Son. He is so rich in kindness and grace that he purchased our freedom with the blood of his Son and forgave our sins”. (Ephesians 1:3-7)
Below are snippets of two articles. Click on the hyperlink below each snippet to read rest of article. Enjoy.
God Desired Us To Be Holy And Without Fault In His Eyes
Before the world was created, God chose us to be holy and without fault in His eyes, enabling Him to enjoy an intimate love relationship with us. Unfortunately, starting with Adam, sin entered the human race, and thus, we have sinned, separating us from a holy God. “Since the wages of sin is death”, every human has a death sentence in hell awaiting them, unless they accept Christ as their Savior. God, in His great love and mercy, despite the fact we daily sin, desired to justify us, so we can not only avoid hell but also become children of God. Justification happens only when we become a Christian, giving us a perfect standing with God, and giving us an inseparable identity in Christ. Every person has an eternal decision to make in regard to salvation.
“Justification is the main hinge on which salvation turns.” (John Calvin)
According to Theopedia, “Justification is the doctrine that God pardons, accepts, and declares a sinner to be “just” on the basis of Christ’s righteousness (Rom 3:24-26; 4:25; 5:15-21) which results in God’s peace (Rom 5:1), His Spirit (Rom 8:4), and salvation. Justification is by grace through faith in Jesus Christ, apart from all works and merit of the sinner (cf. Rom 1:18-3:28).”
Omniscient God knew before He created the world that man would sin. Also, being a god of perfect love and mercy, God wanted to pity mankind, forgiving them of all their sins so people could avoid hell; He also desired an intimate love relationship with them. Thus, our holy and just God implemented a justification idea involving Christ to pay the penalty for all of our sins, therefore giving every human the opportunity to be pardoned, accepted, and considered just by a perfect and holy God, despite the fact everyone sins. If human free will chooses to be justified by pursuing God’s path to become a Christian, not only will man be freed from hell, but will become children of God.
Our holy God is too pure to look at sin as He declared hell being the punishment of our sins, A perfect God is incapable of allowing justice go unserved. Thankfully, Christ became our substitute.
God Wanted To Adopt You Into His Family, Giving Him Great Pleasure
Because of justification, God views us “holy and without fault in His sight”, although we daily sin. From justification attained through salvation, Christians have been adopted into God’s family, always being eternally loved, totally forgiven, completely accepted, and considered valuable by a perfect God in heaven, the most respected of all beings. We must daily believe all this as we connect daily to Abba Father, in spite of our Father’s wound.
“Adoption is the highest privilege that the gospel offers: higher even than justification.. . To be right with God the Judge is a great thing, but to be loved and cared for by God the Father is greater”. (J. I. Packer)
Defined by Theopedia, “Adoption is that privilege, bestowed upon those who are united with Christ, and justified by faith, by which they are admitted into the family of God, adopted as his children, and made joint heirs with his own Son.”
When God justified us, He simply could have desired no relationship with us, daily focusing primarily on His personal affairs. Only choosing to sacrifice Christ to declare us unguilty, and not deciding to adopted us as His dearly beloved children, would easily suffice as an enormous act of benevolence. Instead, God chose to be a father to everyone, even when man was enemies with God.
According to Mark DeJesus, “there are two fundamental truths of your identity. You are a child of God. You are loved by God!”
‘Without a personal love relationship with God, we will struggle with our identity. Without a clear identity, we will search for love and meaning in all wrong places” (DeJesus). Until we firmly realize who we are in Christ, our lives will remain unfulfilled and unhealed from our Father’s wound.
“You must know, rest in, think through, and act upon your new identity – you are in Christ” (Sinclair B. Ferguson).
“Our identity rests in God’s relentless tenderness for us revealed in Jesus Christ” (Brennan Manning).
Justification resulted from God’s perfect love toward us as Christ died on the cross. The price Abba Father paid for our adoption was His dearly beloved Christ’s life, showing how valuable God deems us to be. Imagine the love of a person toward an adopted child choosing to sacrificing his other son’s life in order to obtain adoption. Priceless and valuable: that is how Abba Father views the worth of every adopted child of His, as God is perfect love, loves everyone equally the same, and has no favorites. If Satan ever tells you, “you are unloved”, look at the cross!
Because of justification, every Christian can experience God’s peace and perfect fatherly care, regardless of the frequency or the nature of their sins. Justification states every time we sin, God sees Christ’s perfect standing accrued to our account; consequently, God will always treat and regard every Christian as if he never sinned. Thus, because of His perfect grace and mercy, God will always choose to eternally love, completely forgive, and totally accept, every Christian. Every sin of every Christian of all humanity has been paid for on Calvary!
If you haven’t read, “Do You Experience the Love of Your Father?” yet, here’s your chance!
Do You Experience Love From Your Father?
Mark DeJesus once said: “Your two greatest needs are to know you are loved and to know who you are.” “Am I loved?” deals with “how well you can give and receive love in experiencing loving, fruitful relationships with God and others.” “Who am I?” is all about “your ability to live securely from your identity in Christ as Father God’s child”, and “seeing your unique design and living powerfully from the identity God has given you.” “Everything in life – all our battles and struggles – come down to how we answer those two very important questions.” (DeJesus).
Do you truly experience the unconditional love of Abba Father in your heart? I am not asking if you possess a head knowledge that God loves you – many Christians can easily quote various Bible verses about God’s love but daily fail to experience a close, intimate love connection with God. This is unfortunate because our “greatest need in life is to have an ongoing experience with the love of God in a real and personal way” (DeJesus).
“When we experience God’s love, we realize how significant we are in God’s eyes. It is being loved by God, the Father, that defines our identity” (Mark DeJesus).
Countless children have failed to receive proper love from their earthly father, producing a father’s wound in those kids. Satan attempts to use this father’s wound in a Christian’s life to sabotage their success in truly experiencing love from Father God. Because their father unloved them, too many Christians with a father’s wound, therefore, perceive themselves as being unloved by God and others, and struggle with identity and self-image issues.
When you look at yourself in the mirror, do you see a good person? Can you truthfully say: “I am me, an okay individual?”
The Father’s Wound Defined
(https://www.focusonthefamily.ca/content/understanding-and-healing-the-father-wound)
Father’s wound is “a deficiency of love from the birth father and or predominant father care-giver, whether intentional or unintentional”. Potential ways a father can cause this deep emotional wound in a child include: