Embracing Our Glory: Adoption, Suffering, and Hope in Christ

So, this is a passage in which I think we can say the Apostle Paul is creating for us the atmosphere of our highest privilege as Christian believers. That we have been born again into the family of God, that we have been adopted as His children and that He has become our heavenly Father, as he says here in these memorable words, through the Spirit, "we cry out, 'Abba, Father!'" [00:04:27]

In verse 17, our destiny as children is to be glorified with Christ. In verse 18, he speaks about the glory that is to be revealed to us, or I think we might even translate that the glory that is to be revealed "into us," into our very, very being. Verse 21, he speaks about the freedom of the glory of the sons of God, into which the whole creation will enter. [00:05:04]

We are in Christ now, and because we are in Christ, we have become the children of God. We become brothers and sisters to the Lord Jesus and to one another. And because that is our condition and our status, we also have the destiny of our elder brother to look forward to, namely, to share in His glory. [00:06:33]

The tragedy of the human condition is that we have exchanged the glory of God for idolatry, and that is our situation and our condition. And as a result of that, it's not only ourselves as human beings; it's the world over which we were intended to exercise dominion that has begun to creak at the edges. [00:09:56]

And the reason, of course, our Lord Jesus says those words on the cross in the agony of His passion, bearing the judgment of God, is because God's first son, Adam, so tragically, not only failed, but exchanged the glory of God for the idolatry of himself and his idolatry for the world. [00:13:37]

And it is the wonder of the gospel as he says in 8:29 to 30, that in Jesus Christ what was lost in Adam is now being restored to us. And that's the second thing I want you to notice. If these words that Paul writes, or rather that his scribe Tertius writes, are set against the background of the tragedy of a lost glory, then he's also teaching us, isn't he, the recovery of that glory by our Redeemer, Jesus Christ for our sakes. [00:23:18]

And the whole of Jesus' incarnation, His life, His ministry, His sufferings, His miracles of healing, His undoing of the evidences of the fall in people's lives, all an indication to us that the new Adam has come. And in the life and death and resurrection and ascension and heavenly session and final return of our Lord Jesus Christ, this new Adam means to accomplish what the first Adam failed to accomplish. [00:24:16]

And this is our glorious gospel. This is our hope, brothers and sisters. This is what marks us out in a decaying and dying world, that we know what the telos is. We know what the end is. And so, what we see Paul saying here in terms of the back cloth in the tragedy of a lost glory, and his story of the recovery of that glory by our Savior Jesus Christ, leads inevitably to the destiny for which we are intended, as we are given this amazing privilege of sharing in that glory. [00:34:35]

The love of God that is the world He inhabits in heaven, and the saints in glory now inhabit, that love is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit who is given to us, and we already begin to taste it. We might, some of us, might even go home, and someone says, "What was the Ligonier conference like?" And we'll say, "It's glorious! It was glorious!" [00:35:29]

He, he, he teaches us that it's, it's this that sheds light on our suffering. He says the Christian looks at suffering and understands that suffering in his or her life becomes the raw materials out of which God will create the glory that will shine in them. Now people sometimes say, "Will we recognize one another in the future world?" And the answer is "Yes, but it may take a few minutes." [00:36:46]

And what a reassurance and stabilizing element in our Christian lives that is. And it's all subservient to this, what is His purpose? His purpose, verse 29 and chapter 8 is that those He predestined would be conformed to the likeness of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brothers. "Beloved," as John says, "we are God's children now, but it does not yet appear what we shall be. But when He appears, we shall be like Him, because we shall see Him as he is." [00:40:06]

And then the day will come, the glorious day of the future, when He will wipe away every tear from our eyes. I came across these words written by the great metaphysical English poet, John Donne. "He loves us to the end, and not to our end, but to His end, and His end is that He might love us more." His end is that He might love us more. "You mean there's more, Lord?" "Oh, yes. There's so much more! And it's all waiting for you in the glorious end." [00:44:59]