If I were to adopt a boy or a girl, I could try to give them an education. I could try to look after them. I could try to provide them with food, clothing and all these things but there is something I could not do. I couldn’t impart my likeness, but here is where the illustration falls down, because one great aspect of God’s adoption is that he imparts to us a likeness of Christ and there is a divine likeness within us, and that mean, ill-tempered person, that selfish person in the past, becomes gracious, refined, pure, gentle, and loving.
What does a father do? A father protects his child. I shall be protected by God. The enemy will attack me; Satan will tempt me. In my foolishness I may stumble and fall into sin but if I am truly adopted, God, who is the perfect Father, will bring me back. Even if he has to discipline me, the perfect Father disciplines. What a privilege to be even disciplined by God; even punished sometimes to bring me back. Then I know he is my father. He provides for me all spiritual blessings. He provides me with clothing – the righteousness of Jesus Christ in which I stand.
When we pray, pray to a sovereign God. I think of a man who worked as a kind of underwriter for a well-known insurance company. In those days, he had an office, and all his working life, forty years, he sat behind the same window overlooking Piccadilly Circus with the exception of his war service. He had believing parents, who when he was young prayed for him; he was an only son. He never came to the Lord and he was never converted, but they never gave up praying, and after both parents died, some years after, God moved in his heart, and he was humbled and he repented and he found the Lord. There are many like that. Their parents have prayed right to their death beds and never seen the fruit, but God has not forgotten their prayers but has answered them in his own time. You never have to say, ‘Oh but they may resist, after all it is the sinner’s choice.’ With the sovereign election of God you know at least this – I prayed to God who has total power; if it is his will, he can save that lost soul.
Why do we evangelise? If God has chosen an elect people and will bring them to himself, why do we not just sit and wait for them to come into the church and profess him? Some people actually think like this, and they say, clearly it is wrong to appeal to souls, and to reason with them, and to lay Christ before them, and to warn them of hell and rejection. It is wrong to do that because salvation is entirely the work of God, in which neither the preacher nor the hearer can participate. So why preach the gospel? Well for one thing, we happen to be commanded to evangelise. Remember the closing verses of the Gospel of Matthew, the great commission of the Lord Jesus Christ to his disciples and to all who would succeed them. ‘Go ye therefore.’ We are to go into all the world and teach all nations and win souls and evangelise. Although it is God’s sovereign work and he has predetermined those in whose hearts he will move, it is God’s will that people will hear the gospel. As he works in their heart, they are consciously persuaded by it and become aware of their sinfulness and need; they are humbled before him, and run to him and repent of their sin. God wills that there is a genuine, personal response of the individual to the gospel. Prototype pastors like Timothy are commanded, Do the work of an evangelist. That is a command to him and to us all. The apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians 9 – ‘Woe is unto me if I preach not the Gospel.’ I am compelled by the Lord to preach the Gospel. And in the book of Acts we read repeatedly what the apostles did, and we read words like ‘they persuaded’, and various Greek words which mean, they persuaded and remonstrated with people and warned them and pleaded with them. Through preaching, whether it is in books or in Sunday School or by personal testimony or from the pulpit through the proclamation of the Gospel, the Spirit of God opens the hearts of those who are elected to life and convicts them and shows them their need. God does this so that his heart may be revealed to the world. All mankind is against him, but the offer of free salvation in the gospel tells the world what might have been if they had responded and taken his offer seriously. Through the gospel the elect are called, and those who will be judged are rendered without excuse.