Theological term
Adoption
102 sermons · All terms
The Faithful Christian Mother
Proverbs 31:28–30 presents the faithful Christian mother not merely as a moral exemplar but as a woman whose fear of the Lord is itself the fruit of sovereign grace — a grace Jeremiah 32 promises God will plant in the hearts of his covenant people. The sermon works through four aspects of the Christian mother's calling: her condition before God, her influence over her children, her God-given authority over them (rooted in the fifth commandment), and her fourfold responsibility to instruct, to set an example, to discipline, and to love. Mothers are urged to press law and gospel upon their children tirelessly, to embrace corporal and verbal discipline without apology, and to find their ultimate confidence not in their own faithfulness but in Christ, the stellar Savior, whose life, death, and resurrection is the only ground of acceptance before God.
2LCF Chapter 12 - Of Adoption
Adoption into the family of God is a sovereign act of grace grounded entirely in union with Christ and received only by those who are justified. Drawing on 1689 London Baptist Confession chapter 12, this exposition distinguishes the creational sense in which all men are God's offspring from the redemptive grace of adoption that belongs to the justified alone. The benefits of adoption — inclusion in God's family, the Spirit of adoption, boldness of access to the throne of grace, God's fatherly pity, protection, provision, discipline, and the inheritance of everlasting salvation sealed by the Holy Spirit — are unfolded through an extensive range of Scripture passages. Adopted sons and daughters are called to walk in love, light, and wisdom, resting in the indicative of the cross as the foundation for all obedience.
Clip: Theology is crucial for every church and believer
Theology proper — the knowledge of who God is as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — is not an academic luxury but the essential foundation of Christian life, worship, and witness. This sermon clip from an exposition of Ephesians 1:3–14 argues that the church's tendency to rush past doxological passages to practical ethics has left believers spiritually thin, prone to a mercenary relationship with God rather than one grounded in the infinite riches of his grace. The preacher calls the congregation to disciplined study of the Trinity, warning that without it believers become vulnerable to ancient heresies and lose the impetus to proclaim Christ to a lost world.
The Redemptive Work of the Son, Part 2
Ephesians 1:8–12 grounds the individual believer's redemption within a cosmic divine purpose: God's wisdom in the plan of salvation maintains all his holy perfections without compromise, the mystery of his will now openly revealed in the gospel calls sinners from every tribe and nation, and all things will be recapitulated — gathered up and set in order — under the lordship of Christ at his return. The inheritance of the elect is secured by predestination, not by human performance, so that the redeemed exist 'to the praise of his glory' — as a trophy case of grace before angels and the entire created order.
The Gracious Purpose of the Father, Part 2
Ephesians 1:5–6 presents predestination not as cold metaphysical fate but as an act of divine love, wherein God in love predetermined his elect unto adoption as sons by Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his own will and not any foreseen merit in the creature. The sermon works through the motive of predestination (the love of God), the means (adoption as sons by Christ, grounded in the covenant of redemption), and the goal (the praise of the glory of God's grace), drawing extensively on parallel Pauline and Johannine texts. Against both Arminian and Pelagian objections, the preacher demonstrates that predestination to adoption is precisely what makes Christian praise coherent — the creature contributes nothing, and God receives all glory. Believers are called to live out their adopted status by walking in love, light, and wisdom as members of the household of God.
The Consubstantiality of the Son, Part 1
John 5:16–23 records the Jewish charge that Jesus made himself equal with God — and Christ's unequivocal affirmation of that charge. Working through verses 16–23, this sermon demonstrates that Jesus responds not by correcting a misunderstanding but by confirming, through four lines of argument, that he is consubstantial with the Father: sharing the same works, the same love, the same life-giving power, and the same sovereign rule. The stakes are ultimate — to dishonor the Son is to dishonor the Father, and to lack the Son is to lack God entirely.
Redeemed by the Precious Blood of Christ
God is an impartial judge who will call every person to account for every transgression of his law, and no corruptible thing — no silver, gold, religious ritual, or moral effort — can satisfy the demands of that justice. Redemption comes exclusively through the precious blood of Christ, the spotless Lamb foreordained before the foundation of the world, whose death made propitiation for sin and whose perfect obedience is imputed to the believer's account. Drawing from 1 Peter 1:17–21, this sermon expounds the condition, command, reason, and result of the Christian's call to conduct life in reverent fear: not a slavish terror born of misunderstanding God's character, but a reverent awe that flows from knowing the God who is both perfectly just and perfectly merciful. The believer's ongoing faith and hope are to rest continually in God — grounded in Christ's resurrection, confirmed by his ascension to glory, and oriented toward the certain hope of the new heaven and new earth.
Exhortations in Light of So Great a Salvation
Peter's exhortations in 1 Peter 1:13–16 are grounded in the prior theological indicatives of the epistle: the elect have been saved by the triune God, unto an incorruptible inheritance, and must now respond with corresponding imperatives. Two commands govern this passage — set your hope fully on the grace to be revealed at Christ's return, and live a holy life in all your conduct — each requiring mental intentionality, self-control, and an understanding of the regenerate nature as 'children of obedience.' The sermon argues that sanctification involves both mortification of former lusts and vivification of the new nature of obedience, while insisting that this holiness contributes nothing to justification, which rests wholly on Christ's perfect active obedience and atoning death.
The Riches of Christ
How can the eternal, omnipotent Son of God be said to have 'become poor'? Expounding 2 Corinthians 8:9, this sermon traces the riches of Christ to His divine nature and works as the second person of the Trinity, and His poverty to the Incarnation, His lowly life, and His sufferings and death. The hypostatic union — two whole natures inseparably joined in one person — is shown to be not merely a speculative doctrine but the theological ground on which the Apostle Paul appeals to the Corinthians for generous giving. The riches believers receive through Christ's poverty are spiritual: justification, sanctification, glorification, and adoption, purchased by His obedience, suffering, and resurrection.
The Meeting with Nicodemus
John 3:1–10 presents Jesus confronting Nicodemus — a ruler of the Sanhedrin sent by the Jerusalem religious leadership — with the doctrine of regeneration: that a man must be born again, born from above, before he can see or enter the kingdom of God. The sermon argues that the new birth is entirely a sovereign act of God Most High, not a command for the sinner to obey by his own power, and that regeneration logically precedes and produces saving faith rather than following it. Those born of God will evidence that new life through faith in Christ, a practice of righteousness, love for the brethren, and an overcoming of the world.
The New Heaven and New Earth
Revelation 21:1–8 presents the new heaven and new earth not as the annihilation and replacement of creation but as its renovation — the consummation of covenant blessing in which God dwells fully and finally with his redeemed people. Working through four elements of the vision (the new creation, the bride, the announcement of blessing, and the voice from the throne), this exposition situates John's language within the broader biblical storyline of paradise lost in Adam and paradise restored in Christ, and interprets the new Jerusalem as the church — the covenant community that has replaced apostate Israel as the bearer of God's covenant promises. The sermon closes with a meditation on individual eschatology, drawing on Job, the Psalms, and the Apostle Paul to comfort believers with the certainty that those who die in Christ pass immediately into his presence, and that the fullness of covenant blessing awaits them in the age to come.
1 Peter 1:3-5
The believer's hope of glory, grounded in 1 Peter 1:3–5, is not a vague aspiration but a certain inheritance secured by God's sovereign mercy and the resurrection of Christ. Peter's doxology unfolds the doctrine of salvation under three headings: God the Father as its author, the nature of that salvation as a living hope pointing to a new creation, and the certainty of preservation by divine power. Because both the inheritance and the heirs are kept — the one reserved in heaven, the other shielded by omnipotence through faith — believers facing trial are called to reorient every earthly sorrow toward the glory that is to come.
The Testimony of John the Baptist, Part 3
John 1:30–34 records the Baptist's testimony concerning the dignity of Christ's person — his preeminence as the eternal Word who was before John, his anointing with the Spirit without measure for the work of mediation, and his identity as the natural, essential, and eternal Son of God. The sermon traces the Old Testament prophetic background of the Spirit's descent (Isaiah 11, 42, and 61), the active and passive obedience of Christ as the ground of the believer's acceptance before God, and the Baptist's final declaration that this Jesus is the Son of God. From this foundation the preacher draws an urgent gospel application: the same Lamb who takes away sin will visit unbelief with wrath, and the only fitting response is faith in him now.
The Mission of the Word, Part 2
John 1:10–13 presents two contrasting responses to the mission of the incarnate Word: the rejection of the world and of Israel, and the reception of those upon whom Christ confers the right to become children of God. The sermon works through the threefold use of 'world' in verse 10, the parallel between Israel's ancient rebellion and their rejection of the Messiah, and the sovereign grace underlying faith and new birth in verses 12–13. Central to the exposition is the Reformed insistence that regeneration precedes faith — those who receive Christ by believing do so because they have first been born of God — against both Pelagian and Arminian construals of conversion.
How to Treat One Another in the Church
First Timothy 5:1–2 instructs Timothy — and by extension all Christians — on how to treat members of the congregation according to age and gender, framing those relationships by analogy to the family. The sermon grounds this instruction in the Fifth Commandment, drawing on Westminster Larger Catechism questions 124–131 to show that the commandment's scope extends beyond natural parents to all relationships of authority, age, and equality. Pastors must exhort older men as fathers, younger men as brothers, older women as mothers, and younger women as sisters with all purity — avoiding harshness on the one side and laxity or impropriety on the other. The closing application presses the doctrine of adoption: because believers are children of God and joint-heirs with Christ their elder brother, the church is a genuine household, and its members bear mutual responsibility to encourage and bear one another's burdens without waiting for pastoral direction.
The Believer's Response to Trials
James 1:2–8 commands believers to count trials 'all joy' — a disposition that runs counter to every natural instinct. This exposition works through the passage in two movements: the believer's response to trials (vv. 2–4), which establishes the identification, expectation, disposition, and divine purpose of affliction; and the believer's request during trials (vv. 5–8), which calls for the pursuit of wisdom and the exercise of faith. The central burden is that God's redemptive purpose in suffering — conformity to the image of Christ — supplies both the ground for joy and the reason to seek wisdom rather than mere deliverance.
Free Grace Baptist Church - December 29, 2019 PM
Hosea 11:1–11 sets before us the indictment of Israel as a wicked, ungrateful son who responded to the Father's covenant love with relentless idolatry, earning the just sentence of Assyrian exile. Yet the passage turns on the sovereign mercy of God, whose holy love — not Israel's repentance — is the sole ground of restoration. The sermon traces the typological arc from the Exodus through the exile to Matthew 2:15, arguing that Jesus Christ is the true Israel, the obedient Son called out of Egypt, who absorbs the exile his people deserve and so secures their passage through the final judgment. The application is that false worship earns the displeasure of a holy God, while those who cling to Christ alone — justified by his merits, not their own — shall never be handed over.
Free Grace Baptist Church - October 6, 2019 PM
What does it mean that the Father has 'bestowed' his love on sinners so that they should be called children of God? Expounding 1 John 3:1 in the context of a Lord's Supper service, this sermon examines the divine love under four headings: the call to consider it, the object in view, the blessed result of adoption, and the attendant conflict with the world. The love of God is grounded in his impassibility and immutability — he is 'most loving' not as an emotional fluctuation but as an unchanging perfection — and the doctrine of adoption is carefully distinguished from and harmonized with John's language of new birth, following B.B. Warfield's analysis. The sermon closes by directing communicants to fix their minds on Christ rather than on themselves as they receive the bread and cup.
The Chastening of the Lord
Proverbs 3:11–12 commands God's people not to despise or detest divine chastening, grounding that prohibition in the father-son love that moves God to correct those He has received into His family. Working through the Proverbs passages on correction and then taking up the New Covenant application in Hebrews 12:5–11, this sermon demonstrates that chastisement is not evidence of divine hostility but of divine fatherhood — a necessary instrument of sanctification flowing from sovereign, covenant love. The presence of chastening confirms a believer's legitimacy as an adopted child of God, while its fruit — conformity to Christ and the peaceable fruit of righteousness — far outweighs its momentary pain. Believers are therefore called to receive God's correcting hand with submissive trust, remembering that all things, including affliction, work together for good to those who are the called according to His purpose.
Free Grace Baptist Church - September 30, 2018 PM
Psalm 143 confronts the fundamental problem of human unrighteousness: in God's sight no one living is righteous, and David's only refuge is not his own covenant faithfulness but God's righteousness, faithfulness, and hesed. The sermon traces David's two movements — his appeal to God's righteousness in the face of a crushed soul (vv. 1–6) and his petitions for God's guidance as a troubled servant (vv. 7–12) — showing that both sections keep the focus relentlessly on who God is rather than on the psalmist's circumstances. Luther's description of Psalm 143 as a Pauline psalm is vindicated by Paul's verbal allusion in Romans 3:20, where the same confession that no flesh is justified by works of the law becomes the pivot to the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ. The sermon calls believers to let their prayers be preoccupied with God's character and Christ's imputed righteousness rather than their own merit, and invites the unbeliever to look to Christ for a righteousness entirely outside themselves.
A Psalm of the Cross
Psalm 22 is a prophetic psalm of David that transcends David's own experience to describe with precision the suffering, death, and exaltation of the Messiah. The sermon examines the cry of dereliction ('My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?') with theological care, rejecting the notion that the Father abandoned the Son in any way that ruptured the Trinity or dissolved the hypostatic union, and instead grounding the forsakenness in the Son's substitutionary bearing of the wrath due his people. Three features of Messianic confidence sustain Christ through his ordeal — the holiness of God, the past faithfulness of God, and the invoked presence of God — and the congregation is called to meet their own trials with the same theological ballast that sustained the Savior on the cross.
The Liberality of God and the Believer's Security
Romans 8:31–39 confronts the believer with a single overwhelming argument: because the Father did not spare His own Son but delivered Him up for all the elect, He will most certainly freely give them everything else they need. The sermon works through three movements — the declaration of God's liberality in the gift of His Son, the implication that every lesser need is thereby guaranteed, and the application to the believer's unassailable security against accusation, condemnation, and separation. Drawing on the language of propitiation, penal substitution, and the Ordo Salutis, the exposition insists that the believer's confidence rests not on personal virtue or perseverance but on the justifying grace of God and the interceding, unchanging love of Christ.
The Christian's Spiritual State
What is the true spiritual state of God's children, regardless of how they feel in the midst of trials and false teaching? Expounding 1 John 2:12–14, this sermon identifies three present realities that belong to every believer: the forgiveness of sins grounded in Christ's propitiatory work, the knowledge of the gospel through union with Him who is from the beginning, and spiritual strength over the evil one because Christ has conquered the devil on behalf of His people. The application is that these are not aspirational goals but fixed heavenly realities already secured in Christ, and they are to be the source of assurance and courage in daily battle against sin and temptation.
2LCF Chapter 18 - Of the Assurance of Grace and Salvation
The doctrine of assurance of grace and salvation is grounded not in subjective experience or extraordinary revelation, but in the blood and righteousness of Christ revealed in the gospel, confirmed by the inward witness of the Holy Spirit and the objective evidences of saving grace. Working through chapter 18 of the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith, this study distinguishes genuine assurance from carnal presumption, refutes the Roman Catholic and Arminian denials of assurance, and addresses why true believers may wait long before attaining it. Assurance is not of the essence of faith — a believer may possess saving faith without yet possessing settled assurance — yet the ordinary means of grace are the appointed path by which the Spirit revives it. The study closes with the sobering reality that assurance may be shaken by negligence, special sin, or vehement temptation, while insisting that the seed of God in the elect ensures they are never left in utter despair.
2LCF Chapter 16 - Of Good Works
1689 London Baptist Confession chapter 16, 'Of Good Works,' teaches that good works are defined exclusively by God's revealed word, flow necessarily from justification and sanctification, and are enabled entirely by Christ as the believer's vine. The chapter distinguishes scriptural good works — requiring the right matter, root, manner, and end — from both the meritorious works Rome supposes possible and the common-grace works of the unregenerate, which, lacking a heart purified by faith and the goal of God's glory, cannot please God. Believers are exhorted to pursue good works not as the ground of their acceptance before God, but as the fruit of a living faith, performed in Christ's strength and received by God through Christ despite their imperfection.
2LCF Chapter 12 - Of Adoption
Adoption is a gracious act of God whereby those whom He has justified are brought from the household of Adam — where they were sons of disobedience and children of wrath — into the household of God, with all the rights and privileges of divine sonship. This study of 1689 LBCF Chapter 12 traces five dimensions of the doctrine: the recipients of adoption (all the justified), the author of adoption (God alone, not human will), the pre-temporal provenance (the immutable decree of election flowing from divine love), the objective historical ground (the redemptive work of Christ), and the temporal application (the effectual work of the Spirit). The hearer is called to take great comfort in the benefits the confession enumerates — access to the throne of grace, the Spirit of adoption crying Abba Father, divine pity, protection, provision, and chastening — and to live as imitators of God, conducting themselves as members of His household.
The Privilege of Adoption
Galatians 3:26–29 brings the history of redemption into focus on the individual believer's standing before God: all who are in Christ by faith are sons of God, adopted into the divine family through the finished work of the one who became a curse for them. The sermon expounds three features of the believer's new identity — filial adoption by faith, redemptive unity across every human distinction, and covenantal solidarity as the seed of Abraham — while insisting that redemptive unity does not collapse the role distinctions God ordained in creation and confirmed in the apostolic letters. Theological, ethical, doxological, and eschatological implications of adoption are drawn out in the conclusion, calling believers to gratitude, godly conduct, and eschatological hope as blood-bought children of God Most High.
The Riches and the Poverty of Christ
Second Corinthians 8:9 presents the incarnation of the eternal Son as the supreme theological ground for Christian generosity: though he was rich in essential deity, Christ became poor by addition — taking on humanity — that his people through his poverty might become rich. The sermon exposits the riches of Christ in his divine nature and the poverty of Christ in his state of humiliation, drawing on the Chalcedonian definition of the hypostatic union as articulated in the 1689 London Baptist Confession chapter 8. Doctrinal appropriation of Christology is shown to be the indispensable spring of practical Christian living, including sacrificial giving, mortification of sin, and love within the home.
The Galatian Benediction
The opening three verses of Galatians are not mere epistolary formality but carry concentrated theological weight: Paul's identity as a divinely commissioned apostle, the significance of the audience designation, and the rich pastoral benediction of grace and peace. The sermon argues that Paul's apostolic authority is grounded in divine rather than human commissioning, that the absence of the customary commendatory address to the Galatian churches signals a subtle rebuke, and that the benediction of grace and peace is a Trinitarian gift addressing the precise spiritual need created by the Judaizing perversion of justification by faith alone. Hearers are called to seek growth in grace and peace through faithful attendance upon the means of grace, and those outside of Christ are pressed to believe on the one who lived, died, and rose to save sinners.
The Greatness of God
David's prayer in 2 Samuel 7:22–24 structures a twofold ascription of greatness to God: first for who God is in Himself (His unity, triunity, immutability, impassibility, and incomparability), and then for what God has done for His people in redemption, preservation, and positional covenant blessing. The sermon applies David's method directly to the New Covenant, arguing that the greater privileges of the New Covenant demand a correspondingly greater response of worshipful prayer and adoration. The closing movement presses the congregation toward the Lord's Supper as a concrete occasion to extol God's greatness in the very pattern David modeled at the throne of grace.