From The Older Brother’s Room

In the past I have referred to Jesus as our elder brother.  That is a wonderful familial description but it begs the question, “Whose brother is he?”  “Is everyone a member of His family?”  This is the question that Jesus deals with in John 3 when he tells Nicodemus that in order to see the kingdom of God, you must be born again.  Paul says even more explicitly in Ephesians 2:3 that before we are born again we “were by nature children of wrath.”  How would you like going on the “wrath” family vacation?  The phrase “children of wrath” means we are “by birth children of disobedience.”  It is within that context that Jesus calls us to be “born again.”  When we realize that our family of origin is set on disobedience, and that we are active participants in that disobedience, we begin to see our need to be born again.  For some, this hits close to home as you have experienced the destruction of abuse, abandonment or divorce within your earthly family.  You feel like you have lived the “wrath family” experience.  Others of us think because our family looks good, it is not a family of disobedience but we must understand that any failure to love our family, friends and neighbors perfectly or failure to love God with everything we are and have is disobedience.  So how do we get out of this dysfunctional family?  In Ephesians 2:4-5 Paul writes, “But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.”  Being born again is a work God the Father does to adopt us because of his great love.  God adopted us out of our abusive family of “wrath” at the price of His Son.  It is only when we come to admit that we have participated in the destructive nature of our family of origin, admit that we do not want to live that way anymore, turn from it and put our trust in the death of our elder brother for our sins are we born again.  In talking about this subject, author and pastor Sinclair Ferguson wrote, “What, then, is this new birth of which Jesus spoke, which lies at the heart of belonging to God’s family?  It has often been understood to be a special, personal, conversion experience.  In recent years it almost became fashionable to be ‘born again’; it was described by the media as a sociological ‘movement’.  But very often the phrase denoted little more than having a religious experience of the vaguest kind.  The New Testament means something much more specific.”

Do you understand the specifics of being born again?  In order to be born again our elder brother, Jesus, had to ransom or purchase us.  In order to be born again, we must be redeemed and the only way for that to happen is for the Father to pay the adoption costs.  What are they?  The cost for our adoption is death, so being born again means that we trust in the finished work of Christ for our entrance into our new family.  His death paid the price of our sin, his resurrection canceled the debt of our sin and the ongoing work of His Holy Spirit is renewing us to rid our hearts of the residue of remaining sin left in us from our former family.  The pain and blood of our second birth are incurred by the Father, the blessing and joy are all ours.

Let me just say at this point, there are many who think they are born again because we are “respectable” but we need to see that for many of us, we simply became members of a different family of wrath that manifests disobedience differently.  These families abuse and destroy through religious activity.  We attend church faithfully, volunteer in the nursery and may even serve in leadership as a way to become adopted or to prove how worthy we are of being adopted.  One of the marks of these families, is a lack of assurance that you are a child of God.  The main difference between a child of God and a moral cultural Christian is the motivation of the heart.  A moral child of wrath who has not put their trust in Christ is seeking to be good in order to win God’s affection.  An adopted child of God seeks to live his life for God’s glory, which results in doing good.  As one poet wrote,

Our pleasure and our duty,

Though opposite before,

Since we have seen his beauty

Are joined to part no more.

To see the Law by Christ fulfilled,

And hear his pardoning voice,

Changes a slave into a child

And duty into choice.

Which family are you in?  Do you know the joy and delight of the Father for you?  Do you know the freedom of adoption, growing in your new family traits?  Are you seeking to repent more and more and believe that Christ’s work is indeed finished for the Father’s children?  It is my prayer for myself and you, from one older brother to another…