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We are sons of God according Apostle Paul Teachings
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00:00There is a question that has been sitting underneath every theme in this series,
00:03and today we are finally going to name it out loud.
00:06Because everything we have talked about, the Damascus Road, the three years in Arabia,
00:11the sealed identity, the weakness that becomes the vessel for divine power,
00:15the called life versus the self-made life, all of it is pointing toward a single,
00:19foundational reorientation of how a human being understands their relationship to God.
00:24And the reorientation is this. You were never meant to be a servant.
00:28You were always meant to be a son. You were always meant to be a daughter.
00:32And the difference between those two positions is not a matter of degree or of spiritual seniority
00:36or of how long you have been faithful. It is a matter of the kind of relationship God has actually
00:41offered you, which is categorically and permanently different from the relationship that religion has
00:46almost always substituted for it. And Paul, the man who understood this distinction better than
00:51perhaps anyone in the history of the church, spent his life trying to communicate it to
00:55communities that kept quietly, persistently, almost inevitably sliding back toward the servant
01:00framework. Today we are staying in the sun framework, and I think it is going to reach
01:05somewhere that has needed reaching for a very long time. If this series has been doing something
01:10in you that other content has not been able to do, please subscribe to this channel right now and
01:15bring someone with you into this conversation. We are building something here week by week that I
01:20believe the Holy Spirit is using to reach people in the deepest and most honest places of their
01:24interior lives. You do not want to miss where this goes next. To understand what Paul meant by
01:29sonship, we have to understand what he meant by its opposite. And the opposite is not wickedness or
01:35rebellion or obvious moral failure. The opposite of the son in Paul's theological framework is the
01:40slave, the servant, the person who relates to God entirely through the mechanism of obligation and
01:45performance. Who approaches God not from the security of a relationship that has already been
01:50established but from the anxiety of a position that must be continuously maintained through
01:54sufficient compliance. Paul knew what that framework felt like from the inside, because he had been its
02:00most dedicated practitioner. Before the Damascus road, Saul of Tarsus was the servant framework at its
02:06most refined. He served with a completeness and a consistency that surpassed most of his generation,
02:11as he wrote in Galatians 1 and verse 14. And that serving, conducted entirely within the framework of
02:17obligation and performance, had produced a man who was blameless by his own metrics and catastrophically
02:23wrong about the most important thing. The servant framework, at its most disciplined, had been the
02:28vehicle for some of the most devastating damage the early church ever experienced. And the reason was
02:33not that Saul was insincere. It was that sincerity within the wrong framework does not produce
02:38righteousness. It produces a more efficiently executed version of whatever the framework is oriented
02:44toward. And the servant framework, at its core, is oriented toward the self, toward its own standing,
02:50its own security, its own maintenance of a position that it fundamentally does not trust to be secure
02:55without its continued performance. Romans chapter 8 and verse 15 is where Paul drew the distinction with
03:01the precision of a man who had personally experienced both sides of it. He wrote that the believers had not
03:06received a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but they had received the spirit of adoption as sons,
03:11by whom they cry Abba, Father. Two spirits, two entirely different orientations. The spirit of
03:18slavery produces fear, the specific, chronic, low-grade fear of a person who knows that their
03:23position depends on their performance and is therefore never fully secure. The spirit of adoption
03:28produces something categorically different, the cry of Abba, Father. And that word Abba carries a weight
03:34in the original Aramaic that the English translation almost always fails to fully convey. It is not the
03:40formal address of a servant to a master. It is not the respectful address of a subject to a sovereign.
03:46It is the intimate, direct, relationship-assuming word of a child to a father. It is the word that
03:52presupposes belonging. It is the word that does not ask permission to approach because the relationship
03:57itself is the permission. Jesus used this exact word in the Garden of Gethsemane, as Mark 14 and verse 36
04:04records, at the moment of his most vulnerable and most honest address to the father. And Paul was saying
04:10the spirit placed within every believer cries the same word from the same place of intimate,
04:14relationship-grounded confidence. Let me stop here and be honest about something, because I think
04:19this is the place where the gap between theology and experience is most painfully visible in most
04:24believers' lives. Most of us who have been in the church for any length of time know the language of
04:29sonship and adoption. We can quote Romans 8, we can describe the spirit of adoption in accurate
04:35theological terms. And then we go home and relate to God primarily from the framework of the servant.
04:41We approach prayer with the implicit anxiety of someone who is not entirely sure they have done
04:46enough to deserve to be heard. We read scripture with the constant background question of whether
04:50we are measuring up to what it requires. We navigate seasons of failure with the specific shame of
04:56someone who fears that the failure has jeopardized their standing. We are using the language of sons and
05:01daughters while living the interior life of servants. And Paul's entire letter to the Galatians is an
05:07extended, sometimes frustrated, deeply passionate attempt to help a community that had made exactly
05:12that mistake understand why it matters so profoundly which framework they are actually living from.
05:17In Galatians chapter 4 and verses 1 through 7, Paul constructed an argument from first-century
05:23inheritance law that was designed to make the distinction between slave and son as concrete and as
05:27unavoidable as possible. He described an heir who, while still a child, is no different from a slave
05:33despite being the owner of everything, because he is under guardians and managers until the date set by
05:38his father. And then he applied the analogy directly, in the same way, the believers had formerly been
05:44enslaved to the elementary principles of the world, but when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth
05:49his son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that they
05:54might
05:54receive adoption as sons. And because they are sons, God had sent the spirit of his son into their
06:00hearts, crying Abba, Father. And then Paul stated the conclusion with the simplicity that only the
06:06most important things deserve, so you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son then an
06:11heir through
06:11God. So you are no longer a slave but a son. That sentence was written to a community that was
06:17actively
06:17in the process of reintroducing the slave framework into a life that the Damascus road had been designed to
06:22liberate them from. The Galatians had begun in the spirit, as Paul wrote with barely concealed
06:27astonishment in Galatians 3 and verse 3, and were ending in the flesh, not through obvious moral
06:33failure but through the quiet, apparently reasonable decision to add human performance requirements to
06:38the grace that had already been given. They were trying to be both sons and servants simultaneously,
06:44to inhabit the relationship of adoption while maintaining the security system of performance.
06:48And Paul's response was that you cannot do both, not because God withdraws the adoption when
06:54performance is insufficient, but because the servant framework and the son framework operate from
06:58entirely different foundations and produce entirely different interior lives. You cannot lie from both
07:04at once. You are living from one or the other. And the one you are living from determines everything
07:09about how you experience God, how you endure hardship, how you recover from failure, and how you love the
07:14people around you. If this is naming something that you have been living with but have not been able
07:19to articulate, please subscribe to this channel right now and stay close. Because what we are building
07:24toward together in this series is not just a better understanding of Paul's theology. It is a complete
07:30reorientation of the interior life, from the anxiety of the servant to the settledness of the son,
07:35from the performance-driven approach to God that religion almost always produces to the relationship-grounded
07:40approach that the gospel makes possible. And that reorientation is available to you right now,
07:45not when your consistency improves. The evidence that Paul was writing from personal experience
07:50rather than theoretical distance is most visible in Galatians 2 and verse 20, the verse that I believe
07:56is the most autobiographical sentence in all his letters. He wrote that it is no longer I who live,
08:01but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in
08:06the son of God,
08:07who loved me and gave himself for me. Read that last phrase slowly, who loved me and gave himself
08:13for me, not who loved the church and gave himself for it, though both of those things are true.
08:18Who loved me? Paul had moved the most important transaction in history from the abstract to the
08:23personal, from the corporate to the specific, from the theological to the relational. And in doing so,
08:29he had located the foundation of his identity not in his performance but in a love that had been
08:33demonstrated at the most extreme possible cost before Paul had done a single thing to deserve
08:37it, and before Saul of Tarsus had stopped doing the things that should have disqualified him entirely.
08:42This is the theological ground on which the son framework stands, not the ground of maintained
08:47performance, not the ground of accumulated faithfulness, the ground of a love that gave
08:52itself completely for a specific person before that person had become lovable by any external standard.
08:57The son does not relate to the father from the anxiety of someone who might be sent away if the
09:02performance does not hold. The son relates to the father from the security of someone whose place
09:08in the family was established not by their own merit but by the father's decision to adopt them at the
09:12most significant possible cost. And that security, not the feeling of security, which fluctuates with
09:18circumstances, but the reality of security, which is as stable as the character of the one who
09:23established it, is what Paul was trying to press into the lived experience of every community he
09:28ever touched. In Ephesians chapter 1 and verses 4 and 5, Paul reached all the way back before the
09:34beginning of human history to establish the foundation of the sonship he was describing.
09:38He wrote that God chose believers in Christ before the foundation of the world, that they should be
09:43holy and blameless before him, and that in love he predestined them for adoption to himself as sons
09:48through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will. Before the foundation of the world,
09:53the adoption was not a response to performance. It was not a reward for sufficient faithfulness.
09:59It was a decision made in eternity past, rooted entirely in the love and the will of the one who
10:04adopted, without any reference whatsoever to the merit of the one being adopted. Which means that the
10:09sonship Paul was describing is not something you can earn and not something you can forfeit by
10:13insufficient consistency. It is something that was decided about you before you existed,
10:18demonstrated in the death and resurrection of Jesus, sealed in you by the Spirit as Ephesians 1
10:23and verses 13 and 14 describe, and sustained by the faithfulness of the one who initiated it rather
10:29than the performance of the one who received it. Let me bring this into the most practical possible
10:33territory, because Paul never allowed his theology to remain abstract when it had concrete implications
10:39for how people live. The son framework and the servant framework produce completely different
10:44responses to the same set of circumstances. When a son fails, and sons fail, as the entire history of
10:50the people of God demonstrates with painful consistency, their failure does not reopen the question of
10:56whether they belong to the family. It produces grief, repentance, and the return to a father who,
11:01as Jesus described in Luke 15 and verse 20, runs to meet the returning child while they are still a
11:07long
11:07way off. The son's failure does not change their status. It reveals their need, and the father's
11:13response to revealed need is not withdrawal of relationship but the running, the robe, the ring,
11:18the sandals, and the feast. The servant, by contrast, experiences failure as a potential
11:23disqualification, as evidence that the position is in jeopardy, and responds with either desperate
11:29compensatory performance or with the quiet despair of someone who suspects the position was never really
11:34secure. Paul had been the servant. He became the son, and the difference was not a change in what
11:39he did. It was a change in what he was doing it from. In his letter to the Romans, in
11:44chapter 8 and
11:45verses 16 and 17, Paul described the interior confirmation of sonship with a precision that
11:50goes beyond theological argument into the testimony of lived experience. He wrote that the Spirit himself
11:56bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children then heirs,
12:00heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be
12:05glorified with him. The Spirit bears witness with our spirit, not to our spirit, as if delivering an
12:11external notification, with our spirit, meaning there is a confirming resonance between the spirit of
12:17adoption and the human spirit that has received it, an interior knowing that is not produced by
12:21sufficient performance and is not revoked by insufficient performance, but is the ongoing testimony of the
12:26spirit himself to the reality of what God has done. And then Paul added the condition that sounds at
12:32first like it reintroduces the servant framework through the back door, provided we suffer with
12:36him. But this is not a performance requirement. It is a relational reality. Sons suffer with their
12:42father not to earn their sonship but because the shape of the father's life in this world involves
12:46suffering, and the son who inhabits the father's life will inevitably inhabit the father's experience of
12:51the world. Paul's own suffering, the beatings, the shipwrecks, the imprisonments, the thorn that would
12:57not leave, was not evidence that his sonship was inadequate. It was evidence that his sonship was
13:03real. He was sharing the shape of Christ's life in the world, as he described in Philippians 3 and
13:08verse 10, where he wrote of his desire to know Christ and the power of his resurrection, and to share
13:13his
13:13sufferings, becoming like him in his death. The son who walks in the father's footsteps walks through the
13:19same terrain the father walked. Not to prove anything, but because that is what it looks like
13:24to actually share a life with someone rather than merely serve them from a respectful distance.
13:28This is the invitation that Paul's entire body of writing is extending. Not to serve better,
13:34though service flows naturally from genuine sonship. Not to perform more consistently,
13:39though faithfulness is the natural expression of a person who knows they are loved. But to inhabit the
13:44relationship that has already been given. To cry Abba from the place where the spirit is
13:48already crying it within you. To approach the father not with the anxious calculation of a
13:53servant who is not sure their last report was sufficient, but with the confident intimacy of
13:57a child who has never doubted that they are known, loved, and permanently welcomed home.
14:02You are sons, you are daughters, the adoption was decided before you were born, demonstrated before
14:08you believed, sealed before you were consistent enough to deserve it, and sustained by a faithfulness
14:13that belongs to the father rather than to you. The servant framework has nothing left to offer you.
14:18It never did. And the son framework, the Abba framework, the Romans 8 framework, the it is no
14:23longer I who live framework, is not something you have to earn your way into. It is the reality that
14:29the spirit within you has been crying from the moment of your new birth, waiting for you to stop
14:33living beneath it and start inhabiting it with the full weight of everything you are. Sons, not servants.
14:39This is what Paul spent his life saying. And this is the most liberating and most structurally
14:43important thing you will hear this week. Subscribe to this channel right now, share this video with
14:49someone who has been living the servant life in the son's house for long enough, and come back next
14:53week as we move into the next theme of this series. What the son framework looks like when it is
14:58tested
14:58by the specific pressures that Paul faced in his most difficult missionary seasons, and what it produced
15:03in him that nothing the servant framework could ever have sustained. Do not miss it. Father, we come before you
15:09today not as servants presenting a report but as children coming home, and we ask you to make that
15:14distinction real in us in a way that goes deeper than our theology and reaches the place where we
15:18actually live. Where we have been approaching you with the anxiety of the servant, measuring our recent
15:23performance before we speak, managing the distance between us, presenting our credentials before our
15:28requests. Teach us to cry Abba instead. Let the spirit who is already crying it within us find our voice
15:35joining his without hesitation and without shame. Remind us that the adoption was your decision and
15:40not our achievement, that the sonship was established before we were faithful enough to deserve it, and
15:45that the father who runs to meet the returning child has not slowed down or changed his mind about the
15:50running. Let the son framework become the ground we stand on in our failures as much as in our faithful
15:55seasons, in our doubts as much as in our certainties, in our weakness as much as in the moments when
16:00we feel
16:01most like the people you called us to be. And may the word Abba become the most natural word in
16:05our prayer
16:06vocabulary. The word that rises first, the word that needs no preparation, the word that says I know whose I
16:12am
16:12and I am not afraid to come home. In the name of Jesus Christ, the eternal son, in whom we
16:17have been made
16:18sons and daughters. Amen. If that prayer reached the place where the servant anxiety lives in you, subscribe to
16:25this channel right now and bring someone who has been working for what was always meant to be received.
16:30Because sons do not earn their place at the table, they simply come home to it, and the table has
16:35been set
16:35for you longer than you know.
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