Assurance: God’s Personal Involvement in My Life
Assurance
GOD’S PERSONAL INVOLVEMENT IN MY LIFE
It’s a question that nags every little boy or girl at some point. What if I did something REALLY bad and Mom and Dad decided to disown me?
I toyed with such scary thoughts when I was a child. Especially when I’d misbehaved. Like the time my Uncle Dick caught me smoking a cigarette behind his old Studebaker parked in my grandmother’s driveway. I just knew if he told Mom I would end up in that German orphanage at the end of Monastery Avenue.
Oddly, I can’t recall the punishment my parents gave me. But I wasn’t sent to any orphanage. And sometime afterwards, in a more confident moment, I confided to Mother those worst fears. She just laughed in an understanding way and hugged me close.
Not long ago I talked to a man whose parents actually disowned him. Don recounted how he had formerly been a Benedictine monk, the pride of his Italian family. As a monk, he lived behind ivy-covered walls. For a time he settled into the routine … morning prayers, humble work in a small garden.
But then, through a series of improbable circumstances, he came to faith in Christ and left the monastery. His family was mortified. And then when Christ led Don to make some tough, uncompromising decisions, his parents simply washed their hands of him. His father disowned him, wrote him out of the will, and went so far as to actually mourn his son’s “death.”
Can you imagine the pain Don felt?
After that conversation with Don, I couldn’t help but recall a curious fact a lawyer friend told me years ago. While a father can disown his natural-born offspring, the lawyer told me, he cannot disown an adopted son or daughter.
I don’t pretend to understand all the legal reasoning behind that statute, but it has been a traditional law in culture after culture since the time of Christ.
Could the apostle Paul have had this legality in mind when he penned his letter to the Galatians? I wonder. When God sent forth His Son, he wrote, it was to “redeem those who were under the Law, 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” (4: 5, 7 NASB).
Keeping that adoption rule in mind, it could have been Paul’s way of underlining a critical truth: As adopted children of our heavenly Father, we will never be disowned. Not in time. Not in eternity. Again, in Romans 8 the apostle wrote:
You have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, “Abba! Father!” The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, heirs also, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ (vv. 15-17, NASB).
Sometimes, like a worried little child, you may be tempted to fear God will disown you for one reason or another. Perhaps you imagine Him saying, “If you don’t stop acting like a little rebel, I’m going to leave you. No more intrusions into your life! I’m going to write you out of the will.”
Bring those foolish worries to God and let Him soothe your doubts away. Grip the reality of His eternal Word, and don’t let go. God will never disown you. He will never write you out of His will. He will never leave you or cease to be a Glorious Intruder in your life. What He has given Christ, His first and only Son, He will freely give you as an adopted son or daughter.
My friend Don draws comfort from that thought. So do I. And it’s my earnest hope that as you read the following pages, you too will rest in the certainty that God, the Glorious Intruder, will forever hold you close as His much-loved child. God wants you to be assured of His love!
So continue to stand on Scripture. Grow in Him. And rest assured!