Spiritual Slavery to Spiritual Sonship (8 page)

Instead of protecting his wife from orphan thinking, Adam blamed her; and trust and intimacy between them were lost. Even today, because the orphan heart is so strong, genuine trust and
intimacy are two of the most difficult qualities to develop and maintain in a relationship.

The loss of trust and intimacy then opened the door for guilt and shame to rush in. However, because God loved Adam and Eve so much, He would not allow them to go uncovered and live in shame. He shed the blood of an animal and used its skin to clothe them. This is a perfect illustration showing that no matter how far outside Father’s house we live, Father still wants to cover us. As Peter wrote,
“Love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins”
(1 Pet. 4:8).

God is not ashamed to be called our God (see Heb. 11:16), and Jesus is not ashamed to call us brothers (see Heb. 2:11). As Christians covered by Jesus’ sacrifice, God does not judge us, condemn us, or accuse us (see John 3:16-18; 5:22-24; 12:47-48). He loves us and wants to cover us. Yet Adam blamed Eve for his sin and for their trouble, and she refused to take ownership of her deception, opting instead to pass the buck to the one who deceived her. Thus, Adam and Eve by default chose orphan thinking over being restored into Father’s love.

Consequently, Father God was left with no choice but to displace them from living life in a home. How it must have broken His fatherly heart when He had to drive Adam and Eve from the Garden. But they could not stay as long as they were under the sway of orphan thinking. Their orphan thinking had separated them from the Father, and so they had to leave. God drove them out for another reason as well—mercy. As long as Adam and Eve remained in the Garden, they were in danger of eating fruit from the tree of life and living forever in their alienated, orphan-heart state (see Gen. 3:22-23).

Adam and Eve’s sin and ensuing departure from Eden (home) were the source of all subsequent despair on the earth among men. Fear, anxiety, torment—they all began at this point. Mankind lost all sense of living as if he had a home. Every human born in every
subsequent generation was now born with an orphan heart and became subject to his own mission; then death, which always involves separation, entered in. The death at work in an orphan heart is separation from God, separation from any sense of having a home, and separation from friends and family because of broken trust.

All of this homelessness, despair, broken trust, separation, and alienation are why these words of Jesus are central to the Gospel: “I
will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you”
(John 14:18). We have a home anytime we want it, whenever we are ready to give up the life of orphan thinking and return to the warm embrace of our Father’s love.

Today, as in all the ages of human history, two spirits are in constant conflict on earth for our hearts. The first of these is the spirit of
sonship
, which we can also call the spirit of Isaac, Abraham’s heir and the son of promise. People possessed of this spirit live life as if they have a home. Their destiny is sure and secure.

On the other hand, in conflict with the spirit of sonship is the
orphan
spirit, which causes people to live life as if they don’t have a home. We can call this the spirit of Ishmael, who was Abraham’s natural son by Hagar, his wife Sarah’s handmaid, but who was not included in the inheritance promised to Isaac. While Isaac grew up blessed and lived in anticipation of his inheritance, Ishmael and his mother were sent away. It was said of Ishmael,
“He will be a wild donkey of a man; his hand will be against everyone and everyone’s hand against him, and he will live in hostility toward all his brothers”
(Gen. 16:12). History bears this out. Ishmael’s descendants (the Arab nations) settled near Egypt, far from the land of Canaan,
and have lived in almost continual conflict with Isaac’s descendants, the nation of Israel.

This describes the orphan spirit—independent; hostile; contentious; with no sense of home, belonging, or of being a son. Quite often, the natural foreshadows the spiritual. In other words, earthly events frequently reflect heavenly realities, revealing what is happening in the spiritual realm (see 1 Cor. 15:46).

Today, in the Arab-Israeli conflict, the orphan heart continues to fight for control and domination of those who possess the spirit of sonship. Although the Arabs, who are descendants of Ishmael, own 50 times as much land as do the Jews, who are Isaac’s descendants, they continue to fight to take away what little Israel has.

In the nations of the earth, the orphan heart is waging all-out war against sonship. Lucifer’s orphan thinking has weakened the nations in their understanding of God as a loving, compassionate, and affectionate father. This war is also within the Church, within the business realm, within our families, and within the hearts and minds of individuals. The orphan spirit has gained control of the world system as humankind has become subject to his own mission rather than to the mission of Father God.

The orphan spirit is a heart attitude and a mental stronghold that is a temptation for all of us. But it can also become a demonic stronghold over a person, a church, a workplace, a city, or even a nation.

If you (or a church) have an orphan spirit, as I did for a long time, you feel as though you don’t belong. Love, value, honor, and acceptance are foreign concepts to you. You believe you have to act right, dress right, talk right, and do right in order to be loved and accepted; and even then, it still doesn’t happen. You feel as if there is something more you have to do or put in order to find rest and feel valued. With a spirit of sonship, however, you feel loved, valued, honored, and accepted for who you are as God’s creation. You
have no need to “prove” yourself to anyone. As a son or daughter, you feel a sense of total love and acceptance. Contrarily, as an orphan, you feel like you are on the outside looking in, trying as hard as you can to perform and be good enough to earn a place in someone’s heart.

When wanting to cast out an orphan heart, remember that you can displace it only by introducing it to a loving Father. Even then, an orphan heart must choose to embrace the spirit of sonship by willingly becoming interdependent in relationships and embracing God’s community of love. This is not a once-and-for-all choice. You choose sonship over and over because orphan thinking doesn’t surrender easily, and it often comes back and tries to assert its influence once again. The orphan spirit tries constantly to weaken our families, relationships, and the nations by deceiving us into becoming subject to our own mission rather than living life to experience God’s love and to give it away.

Home is always there for us. By “home,” I mean the place where we find rest from our striving in God’s unconditional love and acceptance. In Christ, we are forgiven and loved, and yet we can still choose our own way. Remember that intimacy precedes fruitfulness. We can’t have a fully meaningful, purposeful, and productive life and healthy relationships until we embrace a heart of sonship with our Father—until we choose to be subject to His mission and find in Him the warm, deep intimacy we have always hungered for. It is in being subject to Father’s mission that we find His strength and life flowing through us and humbling us so that love and intimacy become the motivating factors of our life and ministry.

It was this kind of loving and intimate relationship with God that Paul had in mind when he prayed:

When we begin to displace our orphan spirit by receiving and embracing the spirit of sonship, putting the Great Commandment ahead of the Great Commission will become perfectly natural. Much of what passes today for Great Commission ministry and evangelism has been influenced by orphan thinking, resulting in placing the Great Commission ahead of the Great Commandment. The brokenness of so many families of Christian leaders evidence that fact. Our tendency is to live by the love of law instead of by the law of love. Is it any wonder, then, that the church of today, despite having greater resources available than ever before in history, has not turned the world upside down the way the apostles and other early Christians did in the Book of Acts?

If we are more concerned with ministry than with the needs of our family, then whose mission are we subject to? Satan’s plan is to weaken the nations, and he does this by weakening families first. If satan cannot stop us from doing good things, he will keep us so busy doing good things for others that we neglect our own children who end up feeling like they don’t have a place in our heart, and they too become spiritual orphans.

It’s time to displace this cycle. It’s time to unfasten the lifeline and abandon the wind-tossed, sleet-whipped bow on the sea of fear for the warmth and safety of the wheelhouse. It’s time to stop and wake up from the “numb-numb-ville” of being subject to the enemy’s death-dealing mission and take up the mantle of life as
beloved sons and daughters whose hearts are focused upon Father’s mission.

In the eighth chapter of Romans, Paul talks about this idea of sonship:

Here we find the very heart of sonship. But in order to come into this place of sonship, we have to be led by the Spirit of God, who is a fathering Spirit. He is not a Spirit of slavery leading us into a life of fear again, but the Spirit of sonship. This Spirit of sonship is a Spirit of intimacy and innocence.
Abba
is a Hebrew term of endearment that essentially means the same as “Daddy.” It is a term of intimacy, spoken by children who are in the presence of a loving Father whom they love and trust. In Daddy’s presence there is no fear, no bondage, no oppression, and no anxiety.

The Holy Spirit gives us the inner assurance that we are children of God. And because we are children of God, we are also heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ. To be led by the Spirit of God means to be subject to Father’s mission, and our perfect example for this is the life of Jesus, our Elder Brother. How did Jesus view His mission? He had only one mission—the mission given Him by His Father: “I
tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by Himself; He can do only do what He sees His Father doing, because whatever the
Father does the Son also does”
(John 5:19). And Jesus was completely faithful to Father’s mission. The night before He was crucified, He prayed:
“I have brought You glory on earth by completing the work You gave Me to do”
(John 17:4).

Everything we see in Christ we are heirs to as Christians. The goal of our Christian life is to become like Jesus. But we don’t become like Jesus by focusing our lives on Jesus; we become like Jesus by focusing our lives on what Jesus focused His life on. And Jesus focused His life on being a Son and revealing the Father and His love so that a world of spiritual orphans could become sons and daughters. Jesus wasn’t sinless because He was God; it wasn’t His divinity that made Him the man He was. Jesus was the man He was because of the Father He had. The person each of us becomes will be determined by who we focus our life on.

A little later in His prayer, Jesus prayed for all His followers:

The whole mission of creation is about receiving love and bringing us into unity. That is why Jesus commanded us to love each other as a testimony to the world (see John 13:34-35). Father’s mission is that the entire world experience His love by the love that flows in and through us as we receive His love and give it to the next person we meet. That is our mission in life. It is what we were created for. Every fiber of our being was created to receive love and give it away. Nothing in life is more natural than walking in the love of our Father and passing that unconditional love on to others. On the contrary, the orphan spirit is unnatural, and causes us to be unnatural as long as we allow it to influence us.

We will be subject to one of these two missions—the Father’s mission or satan’s mission—depending on the choices we make. So, choose Father’s mission. Follow Jesus’ example and focus your life upon being a son, finding life and peace. Be a gift of love to the next person you meet.

F
or a seaman looking to escape an impending storm, nothing is more comforting than reaching safe harbor.

In Antarctica, safe harbor for a sailing vessel can be hard to find because almost everywhere you go along the Antarctic Peninsula you encounter nothing but sheer mountainous cliffs, icebergs, and glaciers calving at the water’s edge. In addition to the ice, weather conditions can change without warning, in an instant turning the most beautiful scenery on earth into the most treacherous and life threatening. A sudden drop in temperature or change in wind direction can turn a safe anchorage into a deadly trap as encroaching pack ice and bergs threaten to crush the hull of any small boat unlucky enough to get caught there.