Adopted, Not Readmitted

She has been back eleven weeks and she is behaving like a woman on a work placement.

She arrives about six minutes late so she does not have to stand around. She sits four rows from the back on the side where the pillar is. She does not put her hand up for anything. When the woman on the door says it is good to see you she says thank you, which is the answer a guest gives, and she has noticed herself doing it and cannot stop.

Here is where it comes from.

Her mother died on a Wednesday in March and by the following Sunday she had decided, in the way you decide things in that week, that she would be the one now. Her mother had got all of them there every Sunday for thirty years by force of personality and one particular tone of voice, and somebody had to do it, and she was the eldest daughter and she told God she would.

She lasted about a year. She got two of her brothers to come at Easter, and she kept her own children going till the autumn, and then it fell apart, mostly because it was never a thing one person could carry and partly because she was grieving and did not know it.

And then she stopped coming herself. That was four years.

Now she is back. And what she believes, absolutely, is that she is on probation. Nobody has said it. There is no probation. But she is serving one anyway, and she has decided the term is about a year, and she has a private list of things she will not do until she has done the year: no small group, no putting her name down, no telling anybody how she actually is.

You may be serving a term. You may have come back and immediately reclassified yourself as provisional, and you may have set the length of it yourself, and you may be planning to notify yourself when it is over.

Two spirits, and only one of them was given

Now let me teach you something, because you like to be taught and you have always liked to be taught, and it is exactly what you need.

Paul draws a hard line between two things a person can receive, and he puts them side by side so you cannot confuse them.

For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God.Romans 8:15-16

You have received the Spirit of adoption and you were never handed the other one. Romans 8:15 is written in the past tense about a thing already given, and the Holy Spirit Himself is the one bearing witness with your spirit that you are a daughter.

The spirit of bondage again to fear

Take the first half apart, because Paul is precise and precision is the whole gift here.

Not received. Past tense, settled, done. Whatever else may be true of you, this thing was not handed to you.

The spirit of bondage. A slave's disposition. And a slave's disposition has a very particular shape in a household: watchfulness, provisionality, a constant low reading of the room to work out where you stand today. A slave in a house is never simply in it. A slave is always being assessed.

Again to fear. Again. Meaning: back into the old arrangement, the one you were in before, the one that ran on standing and record and performance.

You were not handed a probationary spirit, and the arrangement you are running on was not issued to you. Romans 8:15 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it out of a letter to Rome and sets it beside a woman four rows from the back on the pillar side.

And then the other half. But ye have received the Spirit of adoption.

Adoption is a legal act, and this is the thing about it that people miss: it is instantaneous and it is complete. There is no adoption with a probationary year. No court in any culture has ever granted somebody a provisional child. The whole point of the instrument is that it makes a stranger a son or a daughter in one movement, with full standing, immediately, and the child has no say in it and nothing to contribute to it.

You are a daughter by a completed legal act and not a member on review. That is the whole force of the word adoption in Romans 8, and the Spirit of God is the one bearing witness to it, which is what Paul says in the very next verse.

Who set the term

So let me ask the question that undoes this whole thing, and I want you to actually answer it.

Who set the year?

Not the woman on the door. Not the pastor. Not your brothers, who are not there anyway. Not God, who does not have a mechanism for it.

You did. In the parking lot, eleven weeks ago, before you went in. You decided the length of a sentence that nobody had passed, in a court that is not sitting, for an offense that is not on any charge sheet, and then you began to serve it with enormous discipline, and you have been doing the paperwork on yourself every Sunday since.

And I understand exactly why, because a probation is safer than a welcome. A probation you control. A welcome you have to receive, and receiving is the harder of the two, and it always has been for you, and that is the actual thing under all of this.

You have been given a standing you cannot earn down to and cannot earn up to. Scripture puts adoption and the witness of the Spirit in the same breath, and His Spirit has been bearing that witness for eleven weeks while you kept your own file open.