Expository Preaching Blog #39 – “Accuracy – Orphans and Adoption”

I believe in expository preaching. It is my pet peeve. It is an obsession with me. It makes it very hard for me to attend church many Sundays. This is nothing new. I have been an expository preacher for the last 50 years. The first sermon I ever preached was an expository sermon. My last one was too. Every sermon in between has been an expository sermon. Yep, I am focused.

There is a reason for that. When I stand in a pulpit the authority is not in my words but in God’s Word. I want to get it right. I want people to be able to trust, rely on and depend on what I say. Not because I said it but because God said it. If I ever preach just what “I think”, then there is no reason for me to preach ever again. There are millions who do just that. I hunger to preach the Word of God. I long to do it and do it right.

Last Sunday I sat in a worship and sang a well-known contemporary Christian song. A lyric caught my ear. It said “I was an orphan.” Some of you might know that song and that phrase. I have heard it often. So using my electronic Bible on my phone I looked it up. Does the Bible call us “orphans?”

Here is what I found. The Bible uses the word “orphan” or “orphans” a total of 38 times. 35 of those times it is talking about a physical human orphan, a person or child without a father and mother. Most of these are warnings or instructions from the Old Testament for Israelites on how to treat orphans and widows. There is one verse in Lamentations 5:3 that the prophet Jeremiah speaks spiritually about Israelites being orphans from God. It is not directed toward Gentiles and it is not in the New Testament.

In John 14:18 Jesus states that “I will not leave you AS orphans, I will come to you.” He does not call us orphans but leaving the disciples as orphans. Then in I Thessalonians 2:17 Paul tells the Thessalonians that he was “orphaned from you” by absence for a short time.

Nowhere in the Bible are people called orphans before they are saved. Consequently we are NEVER “adopted into God’s family” as I have heard preached over and over. That is simply false and inaccurate preaching. We are “born again.” We are born into the family of God. Before our salvation the devil is our “father!” We were never orphans. Now both my father and my mother have died so I am physically an orphan but I was never spiritually an orphan. Study it out!

Pastors, preachers study it out. Study out the proper and accurate understanding of “adoption” in the New Testament. I have addressed this in a previous blog. It is a Jewish cultural thing and it is more accurately stated several times by the Apostle Paul as the “spirit of adoption.” Study it out in its proper Biblical and historical context and you will see what I mean.

If we are going to be expository preachers we need to get it right. We need to put in the time. We need to put in the work. We are preaching God’s word not our message. We must get it right every time, all of the time.

 

Rev. David Johnson

Former Pastor

First Baptist Church of Austin, MN