Adopted: your standing with God

You may be a Christian who has not felt like one for a long time. You pray and the ceiling seems very low. You read that you are a child of God and it lands like a line from someone else’s letter. And somewhere in the back of your mind is a quiet question: if I do not feel it, is it still true?

Here is the answer, and it is the whole article. Your standing with God is adoption, and adoption is a legal fact, not a feeling. In Scripture, the word is taken from the courtroom, not the counseling room. When a child was adopted in Paul’s world, a document was signed, a name was changed, and an inheritance was assigned. None of that rose or fell with the child’s mood the next morning. God has adopted you in Christ. That was settled outside of you, before you, and it holds on the days you feel nothing at all.

Adoption is a status, not a temperature

We tend to use the word adopted softly, as if it meant taken in or made welcome. Paul uses it hard. He is writing to people who lived under Roman law, where adoption was a public legal act. The adopted son received the father’s name, came under the father’s authority, and was written into the father’s estate. Old debts were canceled. The new standing was total and could not be quietly undone.

That is the word Paul reaches for when he wants to say what God has done with us.

But when the time had fully come, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive our adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying out, “Abba, Father!” So you are no longer a slave, but a son; and since you are a son, you are also an heir through God.

Galatians 4:4–7

Notice the order. God sent His Son, born under the law, to redeem us. Then, because we are sons, God sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts. The redemption comes first, the standing comes with it, and the feeling of it, the cry of Abba, Father, comes after. Paul does not say we become sons when we cry out. He says we cry out because we are already sons.

Then the line that should be read slowly: you are no longer a slave, but a son, and since you are a son, you are also an heir. Slaves are kept on as long as they are useful. Sons are kept because they are sons. There is more on the word Abba itself in Abba: what Jesus taught us to call Him.

It was decided before you were born

If adoption depended on you, you would have reason to worry. It does not. Paul traces it back further than your faith, further than your birth, to the will of God before the world began.

He predestined us for adoption as His sons through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of His will,

Ephesians 1:5

He predestined us for adoption. However you understand that word, and faithful Christians have discussed it for a long time, the plain sense is that the decision to make you His child was God’s, and He made it first. It was according to the good pleasure of His will. He wanted to. Nobody talked Him into it, and nobody can talk Him out of it.

This is why the standing is safe. It rests on His pleasure, not your performance. On the day you are most disgusted with yourself, the papers are still signed, because you did not sign them.

Heirs, with a Spirit who says so

Paul says the same thing to the Romans, and adds two things that a struggling child of God needs to hear.

For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery that returns you to fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption to sonship, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. And if we are children, then we are heirs: heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ—if indeed we suffer with Him, so that we may also be glorified with Him.

Romans 8:14–17

The first is the Spirit’s witness. The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. A witness is someone who says what is true regardless of how you feel about it. The Spirit is not describing your emotional state. He is stating a fact about your standing, and He goes on stating it whether or not you can hear Him that day.

The second is inheritance. If children, then heirs, Paul says, heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ. Whatever the Son receives, you receive with Him. That is not a small promise from a Father with a small estate.

Then Paul adds the hard clause: if indeed we suffer with Him. Adoption does not exempt you from suffering. It changes what suffering means. The pain in your life is not proof that the adoption fell through. Christ Himself suffered, and He was never anything but the Son.

What to do on a day you feel nothing

Feelings are not the enemy. They are just not the judge. Here is a way to live inside your standing when your heart is not cooperating.

Say the fact out loud before you say anything else. Something like: I am a child of God because of Jesus, and that was true before I woke up. Say it whether or not it feels true. You are not trying to make yourself believe it by repetition. You are reminding yourself of a document that already exists.

Read Romans 8 from verse 12 to the end of the chapter. It ends with a list of things that cannot separate you from the love of God in Christ. Your mood is not on the list, and that is on purpose.

Then pray, briefly and honestly:

Do one ordinary thing a son or daughter of the house would do. Go to church this week even if you sit in silence. Serve someone in a small way. Tell one believer that you are having a hard time feeling what you know. Adopted children learn they belong partly by living in the house.

If the numbness has lasted a long time, or has come with sleeplessness, loss of appetite, or a heaviness that will not lift, see a doctor. That is not a lack of faith. Many faithful Christians have needed help with the body and the mind, and the Father who adopted you also made the doctor.

The standing holds

Think about who else in Scripture lived under this promise while feeling very little. David wrote psalms from caves. Elijah asked to die under a tree. Peter wept after the rooster crowed. None of them stopped belonging to God because they stopped feeling it. The witness of the Spirit, the signature of the Father, the blood of the Son: those did the holding.

You were adopted by a Father who chose you before the world began, paid for you with His Son, and sent His Spirit to keep telling you so. Feel it when you can. Believe it when you cannot. It is true either way.