From Slave to Child

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. We are starting a new series today. It's called SHIFT. Shifting our minds, our thinking, our actions to focus on the new realities that we have in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Would you please pray with me? Lord God, this day we are thrilled to be in your presence and to be gathered even virtually, Lord. It is such a privilege because we know wherever two or three are gathered, your Spirit is in our midst. We pray, Holy Spirit, that you would teach our hearts, that you would move us, that you would direct us, and that you would truly renew us in mind and spirit to understand the shift that has taken place in our lives, that we have shifted from being slaves to our passions and desires and slaves to the mindset of this world, into the freedom of the children of God. So this day we pray that you would be working that. Lord, we lift up to you all the medical and health care workers, all the frontline workers, all the essential workers, Lord, across this country who are on the front lines of this pandemic response. We pray for their protection. We pray that you give them peace. We pray that they would gain encouragement from others. We pray, Lord, also for the leaders in our nation, that you would bring about more unity rather than disunity, that we wouldn't be fragmented into our little tribes and enclaves and identities, but we would be united around a common purpose. And really the only purpose I can think, Lord, that can be the uniting purpose of all is to understand our relationship with you and therefore with each other. And so truly, Lord, use your church during this time to show what community can be and how it can serve and how in the midst of differences we can be united in one spirit, one Lord, one faith. And we thank you for that. Bless this time that we are together, Lord. May this be a time of transformation, of change, of shift in our attitudes and mind and mindset. Fill us with joy and the peace of the gospel this morning. All this we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. So as we come into this new series, our first passage we're looking at is from the book of Romans, chapter 8, verses 15 through 17. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of adoption as sons by whom we cry, Abba, Father. The spirit himself testifies, bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God and of children than heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him. You know, one of the astonishing things you discover when you read the narrative of the Bible and the story of the people of God in the Old Testament, the children of Israel, when they were released from slavery in Egypt through God parting the Red Sea before them, destroying the Egyptian army behind them and them coming into the wilderness free for the first time in generations. One of the astonishing things that you see is how the people of God react to their freedom because they don't want it. They just don't seem to want it. There is more than one occasion in the Old Testament, like numerous times, that instead of enjoying and relishing and appreciating the freedom and the responsibilities that come with it and being the people of God freed from slavery, they want to go back to Egypt. For instance, in Numbers chapter 14, it says, And they said to one another, let us choose a leader and go back to Egypt. Huh? How is that possible? Why would you want to go back into slavery? It was harsh conditions. They were told what to do, when to do it and how. Their children had been, their male children had been slaughtered time and again. They were beaten and oppressed and enslaved and had no freedoms whatsoever. And yet, time and again in the wilderness, they said, let's go back. Because at least life was predictable. At least we knew what was going to happen the next day. At least we could depend on the food that we received there. They were filled with fears and anxieties over the unpredictable but the glorious nature of the freedom of being the children of God. The irony, well, it's amazing the amount of irony and paradox that brings. But that's what we're dealing with today. How though God in one night brought the children of Israel out of slavery in Egypt into the freedom and then into the promised land. And then one night he got Israel out of Egypt. It took him 40 years to get Egypt out of the Israelites. They were still thinking in their minds like slaves. Today we're starting the series called Shift. It's one thing we're saying to have the fact that change has happened. It's another thing to embrace the change and to live into the change that has already taken place and given us in Jesus Christ. And as followers of Jesus, we see that we have a change of status from that of being slaves to...