So how does it manifest in people's lives? A whole number of ways. Let me just give them quickly and see what Jesus came really to do, I'll just give a couple of scriptures for it. Here's the first thing. An orphan has no sense of home or belonging. When people are born into this world, the thing we are lacking, is a spiritual home and spiritual belonging. There's no sense of name or identity. An orphan has no one to speak words of affirmation in them, to say who they are. They have no father. Spiritually people are orphaned. The third thing is, that there's no inheritance. When you're an orphan, you have no one to leave an inheritance to you, you have no one to leave property, money, finances, resources to you. If you're an orphan, you have no one to provide for you, discipline you, guide you, correct you through life. If you're an orphan, this is what you are: you are alone in life; and this is what you learn: there's no one to look out for me except me. I need to look out for number one. So the whole world system operates on this principle: I must look out for number one. I must look out for me. Why? Because there's no one to provide for me. Actually it's the sign a person's orphaned. With it there are a whole number of issues of course, rejection and abandonment and loneliness and stuff like that, but basically people become subject then to the world system. Now you think how people live their lives. They live as spiritual orphans. When we come into the church, we can easily come in, come to Christ, and yet still live like spiritual orphans. That's what the elder brother did, in the story of the Prodigal Son.
What did Jesus come to do? This is what He came to do: I love this, John 1:12. This is what He said: To as many as received Him, to as many as welcomed Jesus Christ, to as many as believed on Him, and put their trust in Him; He gave them the right, the privilege, to become a child of the living God. To as many as made Jesus welcome, when Jesus came and walked on the earth: one, He showed what the Father was like; He taught what the Father was like; He acted and lived out what the Father is like; He died on the cross to deal with the issue of sin. Why? So we could get out of that place of being an orphan, into a place of intimate connection with the Father. To everyone who received Him, He gave the right and privilege to become a child of God, to become not just a child, but an heir of God, heir to all that God has, access to God, access to love, access to being unconditionally loved.
Jesus came to deliver us of the bondage of performance. Under the law, people perform to get accepted by God. Jesus came to give a different way, it's called grace. It's called: God did it for me! Jesus did the work for me, I need to believe and receive, and become positioned to enter and access my Father's love and blessing. In Romans, Chapter 8 it says: the spirit that He's put in us, is a spirit of adoption; the spirit that you receive when you receive Christ comes into your heart, to place you into your sonship - no longer an orphan, no longer living alone, no longer abandoned, no longer without identity, no longer without someone to speak into your life, no longer without someone to correct you, no longer without an inheritance, no longer having to look out for number one, no longer having to live that kind of life; now access to the treasures of heaven, access to the blessings of God, access to a loving Father. That spirit witnesses with our spirit. I am a child of God, I am loved by my Father.