“Because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba, Father!” Galatians 4:6 NASB
I think it is fair to say MacDonald’s primary passion was revealing and restoring the Father’s heart to His children. Our refusal to acknowledge God as our Father is the primary difficulty of the whole of human affairs. This stubborn independence underlies all most every anxiety and difficulty in life.
Abba is the most intimate of terms used by children with their fathers, like Papa. The most difficult and most beautiful thing in the world is to cry Abba Father from a full heart! And MacDonald was devoted to helping us make this cry to our common Father! This sermon is the central theme of the “Unspoken Sermons.” It is this, in part, what the Kite story is telling us. God is the Creator of everything good and is about the business of drawing His children to Himself and making them good like Himself!
Children by Origin
There are teachings and beliefs in every form of systematic theology that impedes and even make crying Abba Father impossible. One of these teachings is the so-called doctrine of adoption. When we hear and believe, or even partly accept that we are not God’s children by origin, by birth, from the very first moment of our being, but instead need to be adopted into His family, our heart sinks. Our sense of being loved is chilled when we consider we were not born with a Heavenly Father! That we are orphans in the world alone. If God is not our Father, then who is this god that would adopt us?
Children become Sons and Daughters by Tutoring
St. Paul is clear in his teaching, that the concept of Biblical adoption is the raising of a father’s children through tutoring to become sons and daughters. Their education is the form in which they mature from being like kings and queens in training to Kings and Queens! “None but a child could become a son; the idea is, a spiritual coming of age; only when the child is a man is he really and fully a son.” You can only become what you already are!
The Devotion of God to His Children is Perfect. He Dies for Them!
God can no more be content than earthly parents just to birth children. God wants sons and daughters, offsprings, that are of His own soul, spirit, and love. Not merely that He loves them, or that they love Him, but that they love like Him, love as He loves. To accomplish this, adoption in the legal sense will never do! No contract or agreement can give you His Heart! So, He dies, in Christ, to provide us with Himself. He dies to empower us to become like Him! St. Paul says, “… so that I might fully carry out the preaching of the word of God, that is, the mystery which has been hidden from the past ages and generations, but has now been manifested to His saints, to whom God willed to make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” vs3 True sons and daughters think as He thinks, feel what He feels, and judge as He judges. They are at home with Him with no fear because they mean, love, and seek the same things. Because we are God’s Sons, we must become Sons of God!
The world exists for our education. It is our nursery where children become mature sons and daughters. When we have risen and gone to our Father, he will put a robe on our shoulders, a ring on our finger, and shoes on our feet. Then will the whole Cosmos rejoice at our coming of age!
“… There was once a man (God the Father) who had two sons. …” Luke 15:11-32 MSG