Dear Brothers and Sisters,

As we enter a New Year, here are some thoughts from JI Packer on spiritual adoption from his book Knowing God: 

“If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God’s child, and having God as his Father. If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means that he does not understand Christianity very well at all.”

Packer says that if he were to focus the New Testament message in three words, he would choose ‘adoption through propitiation’.

“I do not expect,” he writes, “ever to meet a richer or more pregnant summary of the gospel than that.”

How would Packer summarise the whole of New Testament teaching?A revelation of the Fatherhood of the holy Creator. He summarises the whole of New Testament religion as the knowledge of God as one’s holy Father. He writes:

“Everything that Christ taught, everything that makes the New Testament new, and better than the Old, everything that is distinctively Christian … is summed up in the knowledge of the Fatherhood of God.”

Packer says that each of us should ask ourselves the following questions:
Do I, as a Christian, understand myself?
Do I know my own real identity?
My own real destiny?

Calling this “the Christian’s secret of a Christian life and of a God-honouring life,” he says that we should take the following truths and “Say it over and over to yourself first thing in the morning, last thing at night, as you wait for the bus, any time your mind is free, and ask that you may be enabled to live as one
who knows it is all utterly and completely true.”

1. I am a child of God
2. God is my Father
3. Heaven is my home
4. Every day is one day nearer home
5. My Saviour is my brother
6. Every Christian is my brother too

Every blessing in Christ,

Ian

On January 18th, 8pm  – 9.30pm, in the Vestry, Christianity Explored is starting.

Are you inviting someone, or are you coming along to support others?