Abba, Father!

 

Abba, Father!

Second Series – Sermon Nineteen

Original by George MacDonald

Paraphrase by Dale R. Howie

 "Our childhood is born of His Fatherhood."

If there is one sermon that stands at the center of George MacDonald's theology, it is Abba, Father! More than any other message in the Unspoken Sermons, this one reveals the conviction that shaped everything he wrote. MacDonald believed that every false view of God produces fear, while every true view of God leads us home to the Father's heart. The greatest tragedy of humanity is not primarily sin, failure, or ignorance, but our refusal to believe that God is our common Father.

Many Christians have been taught to think of themselves as outsiders who must somehow become God's children. MacDonald turns that idea upside down. He argues that God is our Father from the very beginning because He is the source of our life. The work of Christ is not to persuade God to become our Father, but to awaken us to the Father who has never ceased loving His children. Salvation is not gaining a new Father; it is returning to the One we have always had. 

This understanding changes everything. It transforms adoption from a legal transaction into a family relationship, redemption from a courtroom into a homecoming, and the Christian life from earning acceptance into growing up in the love of our Father. Paul's language about becoming sons is not about entering God's family but about maturing within it. The Father's purpose is not simply to have children but to raise sons and daughters who share His own heart, character, and love.

The word Abba is the intimate cry of a trusting child—the equivalent of Papa or Daddy. To MacDonald, it is the highest expression of faith. The greatest moment in a person's life is when every fear, every false image of God, and every lingering doubt gives way to the simple, wholehearted cry, "Abba, Father."

The entire creation exists to bring us to that moment. The universe is the Father's nursery, patiently shaping His children until they become the sons and daughters they were created to be. When that work is complete, not only humanity but creation itself will rejoice in the revealing of the children of God.

This sermon is an invitation to lay aside every cold and distant picture of God and to discover the Father revealed perfectly in Jesus Christ. It is an invitation to come home.

Outline

Question - What does it mean to cry, "Abba, Father," from a full heart?

P1 - Adoption? – You have always belonged to the Father.

   P2 - Our Common Father – The refusal to see God as our common Father lies at the heart of all human misery.

      P3 - Spirit of the Child – The Spirit awakens the heart of a child that naturally cries, "Abba, Father."

         P4 - Sonship, Not Adoption – Paul's "adoption" is a child's coming of age, not entrance into God's family.

            P5 - Sons and Daughters – God desires children who grow to share His own heart, character, and love.

               T - Our Father – The journey home is returning to the Father's heart.

             R5 - Becoming What You Are! – We fulfill our destiny by becoming what we were created to be.

         R4 - Adoption of the Body – Sonship is revealed not only in the spirit but ultimately in the transformation of the body.

      R3 - Liberty of Sons – We grow into freedom one thought, one desire, and one act of love at a time.

   R2 - Transformation – Like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, we are being prepared for the glory of our true-selves.

R1 - The Revealing of the Sons of God – This is what I was born to become.

 C - Creation as Our Nursery – The whole creation exists to prepare God's children for their glorious sonship.

(Note: P’s are Points, T is Theme, and R’s are Reflections on the Points and Theme in reverse. Bold text indicates notable quotes. See Cliff notes, for MacDonald’s original quotes)

 

Romans 8:15 NKJV

 

"For you did not receive the spirit of bondage again to fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption by whom we cry out, 'Abba, Father.'"

 

The most beautiful and challenging thing in the world is to cry Abba Father from a full heart! And I would help everyone I could to call upon this Father. – George MacDonald

Adoption?

Question: Why does the doctrine of adoption trouble the heart of a child?

There are teachings within every system of Christian theology that can hinder the natural movement of the heart toward its heavenly Father. Some merely slow that movement; others make it seem almost impossible. The more tender the heart, the more easily it is discouraged by the suspicion of a cold or distant reception from God.

One such cold wind blows at the very gate of heaven—the doctrine that we are not God's children by origin but must somehow become His through adoption. Thank God, that cold wind belongs only to our misunderstandings, not to the Father's heart.

When a heart hears—or even begins to believe—that it is not God's child from the beginning but must first be adopted into His family, love immediately grows cold. The child naturally asks, "Where is my real Father? And who is this who would adopt me?"

As a boy, this doctrine settled over my heart like a mist through which the light struggled to shine. It placed a distance between my heart and God. Looking back, I realize it did not require greater scholarship to overcome that mist. It required trusting the Father's love enough to question anything that contradicted it.

Sometimes faith means refusing to allow even respected religious authority to stand between ourselves and our Father's heart. God Himself is the Teacher of His children. Accepting true authority may require questioning what merely human authority has taught. Honest inquiry is not unbelief. It is often part of the Father's own way of leading His children into truth.

            Answer: Because a child does not long to be adopted by a stranger; a child longs to discover the Father who has always been his own.

Our Common Father

Question: What is the root of humanity's deepest misery?

If no Scripture is of private interpretation, then this cold mist has settled over many hearts besides my own. I cannot believe I was the only child who struggled beneath the teaching that God must first adopt us before we could become His children.

At the heart of all human misery lies one great falsehood—the refusal to know God as our common Father. Remove that falsehood, and you begin to undermine every other difficulty in life.

The heart of a child naturally cries,

"If God is not my Father, why would I want Him to adopt me?"

Adoption could never satisfy that longing.

Who, then, is my Father?

Am I not His from the beginning?

Is God my Father only by some legal arrangement or heavenly transaction?

If I accept adoption in the Western sense, I must also accept that I originally belonged to someone else. But if God is the source of my being, then adoption no longer sounds like acceptance—it sounds like rejection.

"O Father, am I not Your child?"

Suppose someone answered,

"No, you are not His child, but He is willing to call you His child."

The heart immediately protests.

"If He is not my Father, then He can never become my Father."

A father is not made by legal declaration. A father is the source of a child's very existence.

Even if I have wandered far from Him—even if I have become an unworthy child—I do not cease to be His. The failures of a son cannot erase his origin. A child remains the son or daughter of the one from whom life first came.

Is this not the cry that rises from every human heart?

Is this not the Spirit within us crying, "Abba, Father"?

Answer: Every human heart longs, not for adoption by a stranger, but for the Father from whom its life first came.

Spirit of the Child

Question: What did Paul mean by "the spirit of adoption"?

"…you have received the Spirit by whom we cry, ‘Abba, Father.’" — Romans 8:15

Away with the idea of adoption! I could not be adopted unless I were already of the same nature as my Father.

As much as we may love our pets, we cannot adopt one and make it our child. A child must share the nature of its parent. So it is with us. We are God's children because we bear His image and likeness, created to share in His divine life.

I readily admit that if God had abandoned me, if His Spirit no longer called to me, I would never cry out to Him. I would not care whether someone told me I belonged to God or not.

But my Father has never abandoned me.

He has never stopped calling me.

He has never ceased drawing me toward Himself.

Therefore, He has no need to adopt me. Why would my heart care so deeply unless somewhere within me I already knew I belonged to Him?

Someone may answer, "You care because you have learned to love Him."

But that cannot fully explain it. Adoption might satisfy someone who never had a father and wished to gain one. It cannot satisfy the heart that already longs for the Father from whom it came.

However far I have fallen, I remain God's child. Even my conviction of sin becomes evidence of that relationship. It reveals both what I am and what I have not yet become. It awakens the longing to become God's child not only by creation, but by spirit and truth.

Our English translation of Paul's words has often obscured his meaning. Paul alone uses the Greek word huiothesia. While it has sometimes been translated adoption, its setting in Paul's teaching points to something far richer. Martin Luther translated it as "the spirit of a child," or childship—the condition of living as a child in relationship with one's father.

I am convinced of two things. First, Paul did not mean Western adoption. Second, had the translators experienced the distance this word created between the Father's heart and the heart of His children, they might have chosen differently.

Paul is not teaching that God adopts those who are not His own. He is describing a second fathering—a birth from above. The Father is drawing His own children ever deeper into His own heart, until they discover that they were never created to live anywhere else.

It was for this very purpose that Christ gave Himself—that we might be brought home into the Father's embrace.

Answer: The Spirit does not convince us that we may become God's children someday; He awakens us to the Father whose children we have always been, drawing us into the fullness of that relationship.

Not Western Adoption

Question: What did Paul mean by "adoption as sons"?

To understand Paul's meaning, we must read the passage in which he uses the word.

"Now I say, as long as the heir is a child, he does not differ at all from a slave, although he is owner of everything, but he is under guardians and managers until the date set by the father... so that we might receive the adoption as sons... Therefore you are no longer a slave, but a son; and if a son, then an heir through God." Galatians 4:1–7 NASB

 How can Paul speak of an heir through God while meaning that someone who was never God's child has now been legally adopted?

The passage points in exactly the opposite direction.

Paul is describing the raising of a father's own child from immaturity into mature sonship. The child has always belonged to the father. What changes is not the relationship but the child's readiness to enter fully into the privileges and responsibilities of that relationship.

This is not Western adoption.

It is much closer to a spiritual coming of age—a Jewish Bar Mitzvah—when a child assumes the responsibilities of adulthood and begins to live as a mature son.

Only a child can grow into a son or daughter.

The same pattern is true in every healthy family. Children often love their parents long before they truly understand them. Only with maturity do they begin to appreciate their parents' heart, their sacrifices, and their wisdom. Growing older does not make them children; it allows them to become mature sons and daughters.

So it is with our heavenly Father.

Childship is the beginning of the journey.

Sonship is its maturity.

One grows naturally out of the other.

If we do not first know ourselves as God's children, we cannot grow into the sons and daughters He has always intended us to become.

Answer: Paul is not describing the adoption of strangers into God's family, but the maturing of God's own children into the full freedom and responsibility of sons and daughters.

Sons and Daughters

Question: Why is God not satisfied with merely having children?

Our heavenly Father, like every loving earthly parent, is not content simply to have children. His desire is to have sons and daughters after His own heart—children who not only receive His love but who come to love as He loves.

For such a relationship, adoption is not enough.

The Father does not merely give us a place in His household; He gives us Himself. Through His Son, He draws us into His own life, raising us into fellowship with His heart. The purpose of redemption is not simply that we belong to God, but that we gradually become like Him.

Only when we are at home in His presence—free from fear, learning to think, judge, and love as He does—do we begin to live as mature sons and daughters.

This is why we were created.

The purpose of our existence is to share the Father's life, to desire what He desires, to love what He loves, and to seek the good of others as naturally as He does. Every other purpose in life finds its place within this one.

It is unbelief—not faith—that persuades people God has cast them away or that they were never truly His children. Yet the Father has never ceased working to restore His children into the fullness of what He created them to become.

He has always been our Father.

What has been lacking is not His fatherhood, but our willingness to live as His children.

His love has always been present, but until we respond to that love, there is no resting place for the dove of His tenderness.

Because we are His children, we are called to become His sons and daughters.

Nothing less will satisfy the Father's heart.

Nothing less will satisfy ours.

As long as we remain content with merely knowing about Him instead of sharing His life, something within us will continue to hunger. We were made for union with our Father.

Because we are God's children, we are becoming God's sons and daughters.

Even in the small matters of power, the Father would have us be like His Son, Jesus, whose life on earth was the perfect revelation of humanity as God intended it to be.

Everything in creation was made to be subject to humanity, just as it was subject to the Man, Jesus Christ. When the Father is free to have His way with a person, that person begins to exercise loving authority in the world rather than seeking power over it. As Jesus walked upon the water, so He calls His children to live in the freedom and authority of sons and daughters.

Jesus Himself said, "Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in Me, the works that I do, he will do also; and greater works than these he will do; because I go to the Father." John 14:12 NASB

MacDonald beautifully captures this freedom:

“God, whose pleasure brought
Man into being, stands away
As it were, a hand's width off, to give
Room for the newly-made to live.”

The Father does not rule His children by domination but by love. He gives them room to grow into the very freedom for which He created them. His purpose is not merely that we obey Him, but that we willingly share His heart, His life, and His work.

Answer: The Father does not simply want children who belong to Him; He desires sons and daughters who freely share His heart, His love, and His life.

 

Becoming What You Are!

Question: What does it mean to become what we already are?

Our origin is found in the heart and mind of the Trinity. Before creation ever existed, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit delighted in bringing humanity into being. The Word expressed the Father's thoughts concerning us, and the Spirit gave those thoughts life. We were created in Their image and likeness, carrying within us the gift of Their divine life.

This Life is also the Light that reveals who we truly are.

As we choose to live in that Light—as Jesus lived in loving obedience to His Father—we begin to participate in our own becoming. The Light does not merely show us the way; it transforms us into the people we were created to be. Jesus, the firstborn among many brothers and sisters, has already lived the life we were always meant to live. Through our union with Him, His life becomes our life, and His relationship with the Father becomes our own.

John expresses this beautifully:

"Yet wherever men did accept him he gave them the power to become sons of God. These were the men who truly believed in him, and their birth depended not on the course of nature nor on any impulse or plan of man, but on God." John 1:12 Phillips

Notice that John does not say Christ makes us sons of God. Rather, He gives us the power to become what we were created to be.

As we choose the Truth and live in obedience to the Father's love, His life is increasingly formed within us. This is not the acquiring of a new identity but the unveiling of our true one. We are becoming outwardly what has always been true in the Father's heart.

This is our destiny.

To become one with the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit.

To become what we are!

Answer: We become what we already are by living in the Light of the Father's life until His character is formed within us.

 

Adoption of the Body

Question: How does our sonship include the redemption of the body?

Paul was not writing a system of theology. He was writing letters to living people, using language that stretched to express realities larger than words themselves. His thoughts were so expansive that they often pressed the limits of the vocabulary available to him.

This helps explain why Paul uses the Greek word huiothesia in different settings without changing its central meaning. At one point he speaks of sonship as belonging to Israel. At another, it belongs to all who have learned to cry, "Abba, Father!" Yet in Romans 8 he speaks of sonship as something still awaiting its full revelation—not only in our spiritual lives, but in our bodies as well.

"And not only this, but also we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body." Romans 8:23 NASB.

It is not difficult to understand that this placing of sons has both an inward and an outward reality. The outward depends entirely upon the inward, arising from it and revealing it. When the child has passed through the season of tutors and guardians and taken his place as a son, his clothing, responsibilities, and manner of life would naturally change. So it is with us. We move from living as children under the law, serving out of duty and fear, to living as sons and daughters who love both the Father and their neighbor. This transformation requires a change of garments—both spiritual and bodily—from the clothing of slavery to the freedom of sonship. We are laying aside the body of death and awaiting the full redemption of the body, when even our outward life will reveal the sons and daughters we have become within.

Answer - Because God's work is not finished until even our bodies reveal the life of His sons and daughters.

Liberty of Sons

Question: When do we begin to live in the freedom of sons and daughters?

 

Unfortunately, many who have learned to cry, "Abba, Father," have not yet entered into the full liberty of the sons of God. Sons they are, yet they still long for the complete freedom that belongs to mature sonship.

Again, we must remember that Paul is writing a letter, not a systematic theology. Yet in these few words he gives us enough to understand that sonship is both an accomplished reality and a continuing transformation.

We become sons and daughters the moment we lift our hearts to the Father and sincerely desire to be His. The moment we cry, "Abba, Father," something new has begun.

 

But just as the redemption of the world unfolds one life at a time, so the redemption of our own lives unfolds one thought, one desire, and one habit at a time. The Father patiently reshapes us from the inside out. Our new creation is not completed in a single moment but through a lifetime of growing into His likeness.

 

Creation itself has unfolded over ages beyond our imagination. Should we expect our perfection to happen in a day? Now that we knowingly participate with the Spirit, the work moves with greater purpose, but the journey still stretches far beyond what we can presently see.

 

This is why Paul sometimes speaks as though our salvation is already complete and, at other times, as though it still lies ahead. Both are true.

 

Imagine a drowning man who suddenly feels a strong hand seize him. With overwhelming joy he cries, "I am saved!" And rightly so. Yet he has only begun his rescue. He is safe, but he has not yet reached the shore.

 

So it is with us.

 

We become sons and daughters the moment we cry, "Father," but we are still growing into the full freedom of mature sonship. As long as distrust remains, as long as fear lingers, as long as hatred or selfishness still finds a home within us, the Father's work continues. We have not yet fully entered the Life that raised Jesus from the dead.

 

Every step of trust, every act of love, every surrender to the Father's will is another step into the glorious liberty of His sons and daughters.

 

Answer: We enter the liberty of sons the moment we cry, "Abba, Father," but we grow into that freedom one thought, one desire, and one act of love at a time.

Transformation

Question: What is the final transformation for which we are waiting?

 

Until our outward condition reflects the reality of our inward sonship, we have not yet received the fullness of what the Father intends for His children. As long as these mortal bodies remain weak, weary, marked by sickness, aging, forgetfulness, and the weight of earthly life, our transformation is still unfolding.

 

We are preparing for something far greater.

 

Like a butterfly waiting within its chrysalis, we are being prepared to emerge from these present limitations and spread our great heaven-storming wings in the full consciousness of our life in God.

This is why we groan.

 

We are not groaning in despair but in hope, longing for the redemption of the body and the complete revelation of our sonship. The body itself is destined to become a worthy dwelling place for the indwelling Spirit—a living temple revealing the life of Christ.

 

We will always know one another through our bodies, for we were created to reveal ourselves in relationship. The body is not something to escape but something to be redeemed. It reaches its true purpose when it becomes the perfect expression of the son or daughter of God who dwells within.

When Truth has completed Its work in us, our bodies will reveal our true selves without weakness, corruption, or limitation. They will be the bodies we were always meant to have.

John gives us this wonderful promise:

 

"...we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is." 1 John 3:2 NASB

 

I will not speculate about the nature of that resurrection body. Two things are enough for me to know.

 

First, we will still be ourselves.

 

Second, our bodies will perfectly reveal who we truly are, free from every defect, weakness, and imperfection that now burdens us.

 

Then, through both spirit and body, we will know one another more deeply than ever before and experience a joy beyond anything we have yet imagined.

 

Answer: Transformation is the complete redemption of our humanity, when both soul and body fully reveal the sons and daughters we have always been becoming.

The Revealing of the Sons of God

Question - What is the only cure for the human condition?

 

"For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God... And not only this, but also we ourselves... groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body." Romans 8:18–25 NASB

 

God will reveal His sons as they truly are—in character, appearance, and place—when they sit with the Son of God upon the throne of their Father. Only then will creation itself be set free and enter into the freedom and glory of the children of God.

 

Let the skeptic mock and the unjust despise the heart that cries, "Abba, Father!" The God of creation will not fail His own handiwork. Though the glory of our birth has been long delayed, He will faithfully complete what He began. Can the human spirit be more compassionate toward God's creation than God Himself?

 

If my interpretation seems unsatisfactory, spend your energy making sure your own progress in the way of freedom and sonship is certain. Right opinions about the greatest questions have never delivered or healed anyone. Truth becomes life only as it becomes our life.

 

The only cure for the human condition is this: to become the son or daughter of God we were born to be. Until Christ is formed in us, pain and trouble will remain—and so they should. They are the birth pains of a greater life. Until we become the sons and daughters we were created to be, we will never discover life as it was meant to be lived.

 

Both Jesus and His faithful servant Paul reveal the same Father—a Father perfect in love, abundant in self-forgetfulness, unwavering in righteousness, and completely devoted to the good of His children. I cannot believe less of the Father than the Son has revealed. Jesus is the perfect image of the invisible Father. Looking into His face, we see the Father's heart. Though our vision is still incomplete, we see enough to keep moving toward the One who is making us complete.

 

Answer - To become the son or daughter of God we were born to be.

 

Creation as Our Nursery

Question - Why does creation exist?

 

 

So, for Paul, it all comes down to this: the world exists for our education. Creation is not merely the stage upon which history unfolds; it is the nursery in which the Father raises His children. Even now, while humanity is still immature, the whole creation faithfully serves God's purpose, though it neither understands nor chooses the role it plays. It bears the burdens of our immaturity while quietly laboring toward our maturity.

 

Beyond its own will or awareness, the entire creation is working for the development of God's children into the sons and daughters of God. Everything we experience—the beauty and hardship, the joys and sorrows, the victories and failures—is being woven by the Father into our education. Nothing is wasted. Everything serves His purpose of forming Christ within us.

 

When at last His children have risen and gone to their Father; when they are clothed with the best robe, wearing the ring of sonship and the sandals of freedom; when they finally shine in the glory that has always been their destiny, then creation itself will rejoice. The mountains and hills will break forth into singing, and the trees of the field will clap their hands. The whole creation, which has groaned alongside us, will celebrate the revealing of the sons and daughters of God.

 

Then the ancient promises will find their fulfillment. The lion shall lie down with the lamb, and a little child shall lead them. Humanity's deepest dreams of a restored creation will prove not to have been wishful thinking but glimpses of God's eternal purpose. Every true ideal will be fulfilled. Every holy longing will give birth to an even greater longing. The hunger and thirst for righteousness will finally be satisfied.

 

Only then will we fully understand what Jesus meant when He said, "I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly." John 10:10 NASB

 

Creation has never been our prison. It has always been our classroom. The Father's purpose has never been merely to rescue us from the world but to mature us through it until we become His sons and daughters, reflecting His own heart. Then the entire universe will share in the freedom, joy, and glory of the family of God.

 

Answer - To be the Father's nursery, where His children are formed into His sons and daughters.

 

Sermon Answer - It is to know God as our true Father and to become His sons and daughters by sharing His life and love.

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Continue your Quest . . .

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CLIFF NOTES WITH MACDONALD’S ORIGINAL QUOTES

 

Adoption?

 

“When a heart hears—and believes, or half believes—that it is not the child of God by origin, from the first of its being, but may possibly be adopted into his family, its love sinks at once in a cold faint: where is its own father, and who is this that would adopt it? To myself, in the morning of childhood, the evil doctrine was a mist through which the light came struggling,”

 

Our Common Father

 

“The refusal to look up to God as our Father is the one central wrong in the whole human affair; the inability, the one central misery: whatever serves to clear any difficulty from the way of the recognition of the Father, will more or less undermine every difficulty in life.”

 

“But it avails nothing, either for my heart or their argument, to say I have fallen and been cast out: can any repudiation, even that of God, undo the facts of an existent origin? Nor is it merely that he made me: by whose power do I go on living? When he cast me out, as you say, did I then begin to draw my being from myself—or from the devil? In whom do I live and move and have my being? It cannot be that I am not the creature of God.'”

 

Spirit of the Child

 

“The relation of the word [Greek: niothesia] to the form [Greek: thetos], which means "taken," or rather, "placed as one's child," is, I presume, the sole ground for the so translating of it: usage plentiful and invariable could not justify that translation here, in the face of what St. Paul elsewhere shows he means by the word. The Greek word might be variously meant—though I can find no use of it earlier than St. Paul; the English can mean but one thing, and that is not what St. Paul means. "The spirit of adoption" Luther translates "the spirit of a child;" adoption he translates kindschaft, or childship'”

 

“Once more I say, the word used by St Paul does not imply that God adopts children that are not his own, but rather that a second time he fathers his own; that a second time they are born—this time from above; that he will make himself tenfold, yea, infinitely their father: he will have them back into the very bosom whence they issued, issued that they might learn they could live nowhere else; he will have them one with himself. It was for the sake of this that, in his Son, he died for them.”

 

Not Western Adoption

 

“From the passage it is as plain as St. Paul could make it, that, by the word translated adoption, he means the raising of a father's own child from the condition of tutelage and subjection to others, a state which, he says, is no better than that of a slave, to the position and rights of a son. None but a child could become a son; the idea is—a spiritual coming of age; only when the child is a man is he really and fully a son.”

 

Sons and Daughters

 

“God can no more than an earthly parent be content to have only children: he must have sons and daughters— children of his soul, of his spirit, of his love—not merely in the sense that he loves them, or even that they love him, but in the sense that they love like him, love as he loves. For this he does not adopt them; he dies to give them himself, thereby to raise his own to his heart;”

 

“He is our father all the time, for he is true; but until we respond with the truth of children, he cannot let all the father out to us; there is no place for the dove of his tenderness to alight. He is our father, but we are not his children. Because we are his children, we must become his sons and daughters. Nothing will satisfy him, or do for us, but that we be one with our father! What else could serve! How else should life ever be a good! Because we are the sons of God, we must become the sons of God.”

 

“Father would make to himself sons and daughters indeed—that is, such sons and daughters as shall be his sons and daughters not merely by having come from his heart, but by having returned thither—children in virtue of being such as whence they came, such as choose to be what he is. He will have them share in his being and nature—strong wherein he cares for strength; tender and gracious as he is tender and gracious; angry where and as he is angry.”

 Becoming What You Are!

 “He has made us, but we have to be. All things were made through the Word, but that which was made in the Word was life, and that life is the light of men: they who live by this light, that is, live as Jesus lived—by obedience, namely, to the Father, have a share in their own making; the light becomes life in them; they are, in their lower way, alive with the life that was first born in Jesus, and through him has been born in them—by obedience they become one with the godhead:

 'As many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God.'

 He does not make them the sons of God, but he gives them power to become the sons of God: in choosing and obeying the truth, man becomes the true son of the Father of lights.”

 

Adoption of the Body

 

“His ideas are so large that they tax his utterance and make him strain the use of words, but there is no danger to the honest heart, which alone he regards, of misunderstanding them, though 'the ignorant and unsteadfast wrest them' yet. At one time he speaks of the sonship as being the possession of the Israelite, at another as his who has learned to cry Abba, Father; and here, in the passage I have now last to consider, that from the 18th to the 25th verse of this same eighth chapter of his epistle to the Romans, he speaks of the niothesia as yet to come—and as if it had to do, not with our spiritual, but our bodily condition. This use of the word, however, though not the same use as we find anywhere else, is nevertheless entirely consistent with his other uses of it.”

 

Liberty of Sons

 

“We are the sons of God the moment we lift up our hearts, seeking to be sons—the moment we begin to cry Father. But as the world must be redeemed in a few men to begin with, so the soul is redeemed in a few of its thoughts and wants and ways, to begin with: it takes a long time to finish the new creation of this redemption.”

 

“So are we sons when we begin to cry Father, but we are far from perfected sons. So long as there is in us the least taint of distrust, the least lingering of hate or fear, we have not received the sonship; we have not such life in us as raised the body of Jesus; we have not attained to the resurrection of the dead—by which word, in his epistle to the Philippians (iii. 2), St. Paul means, I think, the same thing as here he means by the sonship which he puts in apposition with the redemption of the body:”

 

Transformation

 

“Until our outward condition is that of sons royal, sons divine; so long as the garments of our souls, these mortal bodies, are mean—torn and dragged and stained; so long as we groan under sickness and weakness and weariness, old age, forgetfulness, and all heavy things; so long we have not yet received the sonship in full—we are but getting ready one day to creep from our chrysalids, and spread the great heaven-storming wings of the psyches of God. We groan being burdened; we groan, waiting for the sonship—to wit, the redemption of the body—the uplifting of the body to be a fit house and revelation of the indwelling spirit— nay, like that of Christ, a fit temple and revelation of the deeper indwelling God.”

 

The Sons of God!

 

“Right opinion on questions the most momentous will deliver no man. Cure for any ill in me or about me there is none, but to become the son of God I was born to be. Until such I am, until Christ is born in me, until I am revealed a son of God, pain and trouble will endure—and God grant they may! Call this presumption, and I can only widen my assertion: until you yourself are the son of God you were born to be, you will never find life a good thing.”

 

Creation as Our Nursery

 

“The world exists for our education; it is the nursery of God's children, served by troubled slaves, troubled because the children are themselves slaves—children, but not good children. Beyond its own will or knowledge, the whole creation works for the development of the children of God into the sons of God. When at last the children have arisen and gone to their Father; when they are clothed in the best robe, with a ring on their hands and shoes on their feet, shining out at length in their natural, their predestined sonship; then shall the mountains and the hills break forth before them into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.”