P.O. Box 53055    
Los Angeles, CA 90053   

TAKING OUT THE TRASH BECAUSE YOU LOVE YOUR DAD

An adopted child has it posted on their bedroom door: Do the dishes, make your bed, wash the dog, and practice your piano. If you have to do all this STUFF to STAY adopted - no way. On the other hand, if you’re so grateful to be in this fantastic family, aren’t you glad to make the bed?

I want to tell you about a kid who was forced to grow up within a system of rules and regulations. No, this wasn’t under the thumb of the Taliban; it was in the home of a kind Christian pastor right in here in the evangelically liberated U.S. of A.

Pastor M. Craig Barnes is senior pastor of National Presbyterian Church in downtown Washington, D.C., himself the son of a preacher. But he’s not writing about himself in this wonderful article printed in Leadership magazine, Winter 2001, entitled “It’s Not About You.” Instead, he’s describing his adopted brother, Roger — and since our topic in recent weeks has been the spiritual issue of adoption, we’ve been saving this great story for just such a time as now.

As Pastor Barnes tells it, Roger was a 12-year-old kid living with two drug-addicted parents. In fact, his biological dad and mom both were killed by overdoses. So Pastor Barnes’ dad, also a minister, tried to intervene. No one wanted this boy, though, and so the Barnes family took Roger in themselves.

“From the day he walked [through] the door,” Pastor Barnes [the son] writes, “Roger became my joint heir in the family. He stayed with us until he was grown. Then he joined the army.”

All of the great blessings we’ve been describing for four weeks now about adoption — how the father loves us, provides for us, gives us an eternal future, calls us sons and daughters — this kid Roger now enjoyed. No more screaming fights, no more drugs, no more fear, no more worrying about money or food or a roof over your head or a bed to sleep in and a parent to hug you before you climbed into that bed. This kid, Roger, had it all.

But he had one more thing too. RULES! There weren’t many regulations living in the old crack house, but now under the roof of Rev. Barnes, there were regulations and commandments everywhere.

“My parents did a wonderful thing in making Roger part of our family,” Pastor Barnes tells us. “But it created a lot of work for him. You can imagine that growing up in the home of heroin addicts was a different experience than what Roger discovered in the home of my pietist parents. So many times I heard my parents say, ‘No, no, Roger, that’s not how we act here. You don’t have to fight or scream or hurt others to get what you want. No, no. WE EXPECT YOU TO ACT DIFFERENTLY HERE.”

So we have to ask a vital Christian question. Did this poor boy move into a rigid system of works, with a kind of “Christian Sharia” code where you have to wear the burqa and can’t play music or fly a kite? In his new home, Pastor Barnes confesses, “[Roger] had to learn about sharing, manners, and” — hold your breath now — “family chores.” This young man, redeemed from slavery to sin, now had to actually do the dishes and essentially sing for his supper. What kind of free grace is this?

Well, friend, let’s return to that story in a moment, but I want to rejoin right here our weeks-long discussion about adoption itself and what it means to the believer. Because we’re all like this kid Roger. A wonderful Father has taken us in and given us a bed, a place at the table, and a future in the family. But we’ve been in a section in Dr. J. I. Packer’s inspiring book, Knowing God, where he suggests that one benefit of adoption is that, through it, we learn the true meaning of “gospel holiness.” Authentic, holy, obedient Christian living. Natural, instinctive commandment-keeping. And right away we see a pile of dirty dishes in the sink and an unmade bed and trash to take out, and we say, “Oh dear. Is this the catch in ‘adoption’?”

Well, Dr. Packer goes right to that question.

“This throws light” — the issue of gospel holiness — “on the question of God’s place in the Christian life. Many have found it hard to see what claim the law can have on the Christian. We are free from the law, they say; our salvation does not depend on law-keeping; we are justified through the blood and righteousness of Jesus Christ.”

That’s all true, of course; that is absolutely true for every son or daughter of God. So Dr. Packer continues:

“How, then, can it matter, or make any difference to anything, whether we keep the law henceforth or not? And since justification means the pardon of all sin, past, present and future, and complete acceptance for all eternity, why should we be concerned whether we sin or not?”

This gifted writer goes so far as to pose the question of whether trying to keep God’s laws even smacks of rejecting justification. Are we disdaining Calvary when we read and follow Exodus 20 and the Beatitudes?

“Why should we think God is concerned?” Packer continues. “Does it not show an imperfect grasp of justification when a Christian makes an issue of his daily sins, and spends time mourning over them and seeking forgiveness for them? Is not a refusal to look to the law for instruction, or to be concerned about one’s daily shortcomings, part of the true boldness of justifying faith?”

Wow. Those are hard questions. The Apostle Paul himself, all through his letter to the Romans, asserts that our faith, our “adoption,” if you will, takes place completely “APART from observing the law.” That’s chapter 3, verse 28.

Let’s go back to that blended household where young Craig had to watch his step-brother Roger learn to get along in a kingdom where kids had to sweep out the garage and do their algebra every night. Work work work. Rules rules rules. And here’s a huge summation:

“Was any of Roger’s hard work,” he asks, “in changing his behavior necessary to be part of the family? No, by the grace of my father, he was made my brother from the day he arrived. But he still had a lot of changes to make. It was only because he was so overwhelmed by my parents’ love for him that he could make those changes.”

Packer throws a big theological word at us in reminding his readers that —

— “The Puritans had to face these ‘antinomian’ ideas, and sometimes made heavy weather of answering them.”

Antinomian referring to the tendency Christians have to say that we’re free from observing the moral law because of grace and faith and Calvary. That’s exactly the dirty garage we’re parked in right this very minute. He continues, and now please notice this, which is perhaps the most important sentence in Packer’s entire book. I mean it:

“The truth is that THESE IDEAS MUST BE ANSWERED IN TERMS NOT OF JUSTIFICATION BUT OF ADOPTION. . . . Once the distinction is drawn between these two elements in the gift of salvation, the correct reply becomes plain.”

Let’s go back yet again to the story of this boy, Roger. The heroin and the needles and the bullet holes in the bedroom wall were gone . . . and now he had to do dishes and give the family dog a bath once a week. He had to obey the commandments of the Barnes household. And this Pastor Barnes addresses the question of what the works are for:

“Do we have a lot of work to do once the Holy Spirit grafts us into Christ’s relationship to the Father? Are there major changes we have to make in life? Oh, yes. Not in order to BE a son or daughter. But because, by the grace of the Father, we now ARE. And when we revert to our old addiction to hurt and the sin that rises out of that hurt, the Spirit will say to us, ‘No, no. That’s not how we act in this family.’”

As we always like to say on this broadcast, quoting from C. S. Lewis, “We obey in a new way, a less-worried way.” James Packer, who has just suggested that seeing obedience through glasses of adoption, not justification, gives us the correct reply, then spells it out in clear English:

“What IS that reply? It is this: that, while it is certainly true that justification frees one forever from the need to keep the law, or try to, as the means of earning life, it is equally true that adoption lays on one the abiding obligation to keep the law, as the means of pleasing one’s newfound Father.”

Isn’t that powerful? Friend, that’s the gospel right there. We obey to please God. We obey to honor His name and strengthen His kingdom.

This young man, Roger, was so grateful to be in the Barnes family. Thankful for his new dad; grateful for a wonderful mom, and, I’m sure, to have this Craig as his brother. So, yes, he learned the new table manners and how to dust furniture and put his bicycle away every night and say “please” and “thank you” at the dinner table.

And then Roger went away to war. He went to fight in Vietnam, and was killed there. What a painful end to a wonderful story! And yet, as Pastor Barnes so humbly shares it, his adopted brother died while committing an act of heroism there in the jungles of Southeast Asia. He was true to the family name; he served his family and his country and his God, and he was an obedient soldier of both the Stars and Stripes and also the Cross of Calvary. He did his Abba, his heavenly Father, proud. And that’s what Christian obedience is all about.