Preaching a Comfortable Doctrine: the Doctrine of Adoption

Dan Peters

Abstract: The Puritan notion of ‘a comfortable gospel’ (that is, a gospel that minsters comfort to believers) is worthy of consideration by contemporary preachers. The article argues that the doctrine of adoption ought to be a key component of ‘comfortable’ preaching. The various benefits of preaching adoption are delineated, including its impact on a congregation’s holiness and prayerfulness. It is proposed that other, quite specific needs are met when adoption is homiletically prominent: a lifeline is extended to those who have wandered from the faith; and the parents of wanderers also receive valuable help. Attention is given to the benefit the pastor himself yields from prioritising this doctrine in his preaching. Finally, the influence of the seminary on the pulpit is noted, and the implications of that for the preaching of adoption are considered.       

Every faithful preacher makes much of atonement through Christ’s blood and justification through Christ’s obedience. Preached well, these grand themes can be marvellously reassuring and liberating. They can convey a sense of peace and security into the hearts of God’s people.

But they can also be expounded in a way that does not reassure and liberate. Some gospel preaching calls to mind the image of a postman. One of the houses on a postman’s round may contain a large, aggressive dog. Between him and the dog, however, is a strong front door. Because of that door, the postman walks up the garden path knowing that he is safe: the growling, barking animal on the other side cannot get at him. But it is still not much fun walking up the path! The postman is not inclined to linger in that garden, enjoying its sights and scents. He is on edge there, and is glad when he can leave and move on to the next house. 

Atonement and justification can be preached as though they are that front door. They succeed in placing us beyond the reach of divine wrath. They stand firmly in the way of everlasting damnation. The believer, sheltering behind these realities, is encouraged from the pulpit to feel safe and protected. But she is not encouraged to feel deeply and rapturously at ease! 

Such preaching might have been diagnosed in the Puritan era as lacking ‘comfort’. This was, for the seventeenth-century divines, a point of great importance: the gospel, in their view, is designed to flood the soul with comfort. Walter Marshall, for example, commends “the comfortable doctrine of former Protestants’ while giving short shrift to those in his own day who preached ‘an uncomfortable gospel”.¹ From a similar perspective John Owen describes Christian conversion as “The soul being…brought into…a comfortable persuasion”.²

Why Gospel Preaching May Lack Comfort

Why is it, then, that some preaching fails to effect that “comfortable persuasion” in believers’ hearts? When the gospel is proclaimed, and the saints are not joyfully consoled, what exactly has gone wrong? The preacher may articulate impeccably the mechanics of penal substitution and imputed righteousness. So, what accounts for that missing note of exhilarating comfort? 

It may be a failure to communicate the origin of Christ’s atoning, justifying work. According to Scripture, the origin is the love of God (Jn. 3:16; Rom. 5:8; 1 Jn. 4:10). There is acquittal for sinners because a loving God desired it. It was his gracious initiative that Christ should live, die and rise for our salvation. But when a preacher omits or underplays this point, he may leave a quite different impression upon his hearers: that Christ’s work caused God to love us; God’s love was secured and won at the cross of Calvary. But love that has to be won is barely worthy of the name. Such ‘love’ is reluctant and conditional, and affords the believer scant comfort. The gospel is only truly comforting when divine benevolence is presented as the source, not the product, of the Redeemer’s mission. Preaching which does not root salvation in the free, irrepressible, unsolicited love of God – however precise its soteriology may otherwise be – breeds joyless insecurity.

But there is a further problem relating to the other ‘end’ of the gospel. Yes, a preacher can fail to communicate the origin of Christ’s work. He can also, however, fail to communicate its terminus. He may stress that, through the cross and resurrection, God is to his people a former enemy now appeased. He may stress that God is to his people a satisfied judge. And he is right to do so: these are, indeed, significant and welcome benefits accruing from the Saviour’s finished work. But they are not its crowning achievement. There is something higher. God is to his people a Father: Christ secured adoption for the elect! And that must be conveyed from the pulpit. If it is not, then the gospel will be preached as coldly juridical rather than as warmly familial. Those who hear will remain (in their thinking) in the clinical setting of the lawcourt, simply relieved their legal problems are over. They will not move with exuberant assurance into the setting of the home. But that is where preaching should leave the believer: seated at God’s fireside, so to speak, gazing into the face of a devoted, tender Father.³

Preaching Adoption Produces Zealous Congregations

Perhaps, however, some would not agree that preaching should transport the believer to God’s fireside. It might be argued that to be so explicit about adoption is unhelpful; that to assert too emphatically that the Christian lives and moves in the atmosphere of family is risky. It makes the gospel excessively comfortable! After all, every preacher desires a congregation that is zealous for holiness: men and women who are resolved to “cast off the works of darkness and put on the armour of light” (Rom. 13:12). Surely, therefore, he does not want them to feel too much at home in the Father’s house! A deep-seated assurance of sonship, the argument might go, is hardly fertile ground for motivated Christian living. It is calculated, instead, to produce complacency; to breed a sense of entitlement rather than an eagerness to serve. Thus, preaching should convey that sins are forgiven and acquittal secure; but it should do so leaving a healthy tension in the air, whereby God is perceived still to be a little distant and reserved. In that way a pastor keeps his congregation driven! 

There is a prima facie plausibility to this logic. It appears reasonable that a pastor should temper his preaching of adoption to keep complacency at bay. But such a homiletical strategy is in fact profoundly mistaken. Indeed, it is fundamentally at odds with the methodology of God himself. In this connection a key New Testament text is Romans 8:12-17. Sons of God, that passage teaches, perform mortification: they “put to death the deeds of the body” (v. 13). Furthermore, they do this “by the Spirit” (v. 13): they are “led by the Spirit of God” in the work of killing their sins (v. 14). And Paul is not content to be vague on this point. He goes on to reveal that part of this Spirit-enabling takes place at the psychological level. In order to make us effective sin-killers, the Spirit causes us to think of ourselves in a certain way.

In what way does the Spirit want us to think of ourselves? What is this self-understanding that he gives us – and that serves so well to fuel mortification? Fascinatingly, Paul explores two alternative possibilities. On the one hand, the Spirit could encourage us to see ourselves as lowly serfs. He could create a sense of God as an austere master. He could cultivate within us a neurotic dread of the divine displeasure. That is the first possibility, in which case this divine person would be to us “the spirit of slavery” (v. 15). 

The other, very different possibility, however, is that the Spirit encourages us to see ourselves as sons rather than as serfs; that he creates a sense of God as a benevolent Father whose paternal affection constantly envelops us. If that is how he operates, then this divine person is to us “the Spirit of adoption” (v. 15).

Which is it, then? Does the believer experience the first possibility or the second? Paul is emphatic: “You did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption” (v. 15)! The apostle continues: “The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (v. 16). God’s method of producing eager, sin-killing Christians is to impart filial certainty. Herman Witsius gives eloquent expression to this:

The Spirit of adoption discovers God to the believing soul, as a kind and indulgent Father; and by giving him assurance of the love of God…makes him, with alacrity…willingly obey God, as an affectionate parent…. [The Spirit] inflames the hearts of the children of God, with returns of love; whereby they yield obedience to God, not any longer from a fear of punishment, but from a pure and sincere affection, and a generous reverence for their most beloved Father…⁴ 

God wants saints who know and feel, unhesitatingly, their membership in his family. For in the divine logic, it is assured sons, not anxious serfs, who will work the hardest at being holy. 

And it is therefore incumbent upon every preacher to fall in line with God’s strategy. If the internal voice of the Spirit sweetly whispers to the believer, ‘You are a cherished child of the heavenly Father,’ the external voice she hears from the pulpit should not convey a harsher message. Sermons should work with – not against – the inner witness of the Spirit. If it is by nurturing assurance that the Spirit inclines Christians to live obediently, pastors should pursue that end by the very same means. It is through preaching the doctrine of adoption in all its tender warmth that they will foster truly zealous congregations. 

Preaching Adoption Encourages Prayer Amidst Trials  

It is worth noting that, as the Spirit assures believers of their adoption, mortification is not the only outcome. Paul, in the same section of Romans 8, mentions another: prayer. Inwardly persuaded by the Spirit that she is an adopted child of God, the Christian cries, “Abba! Father” (v. 15). Both the strength of the verb ‘cry’ and the exclamatory nature of this petition-less prayer suggest that Paul has in mind a troubled situation. The believer is experiencing a crisis. One pictures a toddler who, during an outing in the local park, has fallen over. Lying prostrate on the ground, he cries out to the man who is walking a few yards ahead. The toddler may understand very little of this big wide world in which he is still such a newcomer, but there is one thing he knows intuitively: he knows that man is his father! And the hurting believer’s cry to God proceeds from similar intuitions – intuitions implanted in the heart by the Spirit of adoption. 

It is an attractive image: the Christian, buffeted by life’s storms, having immediate, child-like recourse to the heavenly Father. But every pastor knows that, sadly, reality does not always conform to this image. It burdens him greatly when he sees members of his congregation battered by trials and not, apparently, looking to God. It breaks his heart, indeed, when, instead of looking to God, they reach for an escapist alternative in some form of addictive behaviour; or they simply sink into despair. 

How should he preach to such people? Should he rail against their escapism and their despair? Should he compound the woes of these suffering saints by making them deeply ashamed of their prayerlessness? No! The preacher who takes that approach is not bravely demonstrating tough love. Rather, he is exercising a ministry terribly adrift from that of the Spirit himself. The indwelling Spirit seeks to create such a sense of adoption – such a sense of belonging – that the troubled believer cannot but cry, ‘Abba!’ And the pastor must take his cue from the Spirit. His role is not to drown out the Spirit’s assurances with a thirty-minute rant every Sunday morning. His preaching should reinforce and amplify the internal testimony of the divine Comforter. It should make his wounded hearers unable to stay away a moment longer from their Father, enthused in the midst of their trials to “recline in safety on the paternal indulgence of God”.⁵

Samuel Rutherford graced the pulpit of Anwoth in southwest Scotland with that kind of preaching. Here is an extract from a communion sermon he preached there in 1630:

Ye think nothing of one tear, yet God puts it in His bottle; and nothing of one sigh, but God gathers it in His treasure. If God thought of us as the world does, and as we think of ourselves, oftentimes woeful would our case be; but God has not a pleasanter sight in the world than the face of a child of God. No music delights Him more [than] the sighs and tears, complaints and prayers of His children.⁶

It is difficult to conceive of any saint in Anwoth remaining prayerless when treated to such a compelling homiletical expression of the doctrine of adoption.

Preaching Adoption Offers a Lifeline to Prodigals  

Preaching this doctrine, with frequency and warmth, does more than provide a stimulus to mortification and to prayer, important as those activities are. To some it offers a lifeline. 

In Jesus’ parable concerning the two sons (Lk. 15:11-32), the younger son prematurely receives his inheritance and subsequently proceeds to unravel morally, financially and socially. At the nadir of this downward spiral – desperately hungry, and envious of the pigs he is employed to feed – his situation is truly wretched. But there is then a turning point. And the heart of the turning point is this resolution: “I will arise and go to my father” (v. 18). His words presuppose two basic convictions: that he is a son of the man whose presence and house he had willfully deserted; and that, because he is a son, there remains a way back. It is true that the second conviction is fragile: he harbours a lurking sense his behaviour may have disqualified him now from full-blown filial existence (v. 19). But, though fragile, the conviction is real – and sufficient to propel him out of the pig farm. He knows he does not have to remain in the far country. He knows he belongs in the father’s house and, should he return, there is a place for him there.

Every Christian church has its prodigals – those who have exchanged the Father’s house for an alluring world beyond its front door. Their great need is to reach that point of resolution: “I will arise and go to my Father.” They will only do this if the doctrine of adoption is deeply ingrained in their souls. Some of these prodigals may still take their places in the pew each Sunday and hear preaching; and those who do not will have heard perhaps years of sermons prior to their downward spiral. If the preaching they hear (or have heard) is emphatic that conversion entails adoption, and that God in Christ has become unconditionally our Father, that will come into its own should repentance ever start to form in their hearts. It will prove the difference between despair and resolve; between the crushing feeling, “I have blown it,” and the steely decision, “I will arise and go.” Preaching adoption, therefore, is not dryly ticking one particular box in the ordo salutis. It is in fact James 5:19-20 in action: a pastor “bring[ing] back a sinner from his wandering” and “sav[ing] his soul from death”. It is the extension of a lifeline to badly lapsed believers, enabling them to appreciate that, even for them, God is still approachable.

Preaching Adoption Benefits Parents

A related point is worth mentioning. This preaching of adoption which assures prodigals of God’s parental approachableness also yields a welcome by-product: it encourages some hearers to be approachable parents. In many Christian families there are wayward children: teenage and young-adult offspring mired in radically unbiblical lifestyles. Parents may agonise over how these children ought to be treated. Should they be disowned? Should they be made to feel they have burned their bridges? 

That is not how God’s children are treated! God has the fattened calf on standby for rebel members of his family! If in adoption we receive a Father like that, should we not also be fathers (and mothers) like that?

At the very least that is an implication which parents may well discern when adoption is preached. But a preacher could even include explicitly this particular application of the doctrine. The reformed tradition has bequeathed us many great sermons on adoption.⁷ And there is one by a contemporary preacher which does make the link to Christian parenting. In the concluding section of a sermon entitled ‘The Reality of Divine Sonship’, Geoff Thomas talks about the younger son in the parable:

Somewhere in this boy’s past it had been implanted indelibly that whenever things went wrong he could call home, and when they went badly wrong, he could always come back; he must always come home. He had not been taught, ‘If you disgrace this family then never come back.’ He had not been conditioned to this view, ‘If you let us down… if you bring shame on our name, then don’t bother to return.’ He’d been told, ‘However low you go, however deep the abyss or appalling the degradation you must always feel you have a father [who] loves you and an open door into his presence. Here you can return.’

Thomas then turns his attention to the mothers and fathers in the congregation exercised regarding their offspring: 

What is true for coming back to God is true for our children coming back to us their parents. …our children must know that…they can still come home;
if they become drunkards they can still come home;
if they marry the wrong people they can still come home;
if they become drug addicts they can still come home;
if they get Aids they can still come home
if they get pregnant they can still come home;
if they have an abortion they can still come home;
if they end up in prison they can still come home.
They must have that assurance.⁸

Whether the connection is made explicit, or simply left implicit, parenting benefits significantly from the preaching of adoption.

Preaching Adoption Enriches Pastoral Ministry  

We have noted several ways in which hearers profit from the preaching of adoption. But it is arguable that the preacher himself also profits. More specifically, his pastoral ministry as a whole is enriched by his frequent preaching of adoption. A pastor who often expounds this doctrine is unlikely either to slip into clerical professionalism or to pursue ecclesiastical celebrity. He will not regard the members of the congregation as his clients or as his devotees. Indeed, he will not regard them as his at all! He will see them as God’s adopted children, infinitely precious to the heavenly Father. They may not look like God’s children as they reel under the manifold burdens and indignities of a cursed world (1 Jn. 3:2).⁹ Despite the internal witness of the Spirit, they may at times struggle to see themselves as God’s children. But the pastor will see it. Having insisted fervently and continually from the pulpit, “Beloved, we are God’s children!” (1 Jn. 3:2), he cannot but carry that same conviction into every hospital visit and every counselling session. He will see in the weary, battle-scarred faces of believers what is imperceptible to most observers. He will see membership of the divine family. And, recognising their true, filial identity, he will shepherd them with the deepest gentleness and respect. 

The Importance of the Seminary

If the advantages of preaching adoption, set out in this article, have weight, then it should be a priority of the church to ensure such preaching occurs in its pulpits. That raises a question: what determines which themes are – and which themes are not – being stressed in preaching? Ideally, every truth contained in the Bible ought to be preached, each with as much or little emphasis as its coverage in Scripture warrants. It would be naïve, however, to suppose that this ideal is normally (or ever, indeed) attained. Every pastor inevitably has his biases. And many of these are formed during his theological training. Our seminaries, therefore, have a considerable role in determining which homiletical emphases take precedence. John Piper is right:

We cannot overemphasise the importance of our seminaries in shaping the theology and spirit of the churches and denominations and missionary enterprise. The tone of the classrooms and teachers exerts profound effect on the tone of our pulpits. What the teachers are passionate about will by and large be the passions of our younger pastors. What they neglect will likely be neglected in the pulpits.¹⁰

Thus, it is imperative we have seminaries from which men will emerge passionate about adoption. In systematic theology classrooms, it must be taught that adoption is a discrete jewel within the application of redemption, an additional, crowning honour bestowed upon forgiven and justified sinners. In the teaching of historical theology, students must be confronted with the importance of adoption for such luminaries as John Calvin, Robert Candlish and John Murray. In Practical Theology curricula, it must be driven home that there ought to be congruity between the external testimony of the preacher and the internal testimony of the Spirit of adoption. 

According to Benjamin Warfield: “Palpably, what [the minister] needs…is just the gospel; and if he is to perform his functions at all, he must know this gospel, know it thoroughly, know it in all its details, and in all its power. It is the business of the seminary to give him this knowledge of the gospel. That is the real purpose of the seminary.”¹¹

If the seminary succeeds in imparting to him the comfortable gospel revealed in the New Testament and cherished by our finest evangelical forebears – the gospel that terminates in God warmly receiving sinners into his own very family – then the minister will take to his pulpit eager to declare the glorious doctrine of adoption.

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1. Walter Marshall, The Gospel-Mystery of Sanctification (London: Oliphants Ltd., 1954), 107, 109. ↩︎
2. John Owen, Of Communion with God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, Each Person Distinctly, in Love, Grace, and Consolation (1657), in The Works of John Owen, ed. William H. Goold (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2004), 2:23. ↩︎
3. Sinclair Ferguson discusses – and traces back to Turretin – the failure properly to distinguish adoption from justification and allow the former its full glory (Sinclair B. Ferguson, ‘The Reformed Doctrine of Sonship,’ in Some Pastors and Teachers: Reflecting a Biblical Vision of What Every Minister Is Called to Be [Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 2023], 580-83). ↩︎
4. Herman Witsius, The Economy of the Covenants Between God and Man: Comprehending a Complete Body of Divinity, Vol. 1 (Escondido, California: The den Dulk Christian Foundation, 1990), 456-457. Cf. Walter Marshall (employing again his favourite word we highlighted earlier): “A holy life beginneth with comfort, and is maintained by it” (Marshall, op. cit., 108). ↩︎
5. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Associated Publishers and Authors Inc., undated), 2.15.6. ↩︎
6. Samuel Rutherford, Fourteen Communion Sermons, ed. Andrew A. Bonar (Glasgow: Charles Glass & Co., 1877), 259. ↩︎
7. Examples are a nineteenth-century sermon by Hugh Martin entitled ‘The Sons of God’ (Hugh Martin, Christ for Us: Sermons of Hugh Martin [Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1998], 225-45), and a twentieth-century one by Martyn Lloyd-Jones on Ephesians 1:5 (https://www.mljtrust.org/sermons/book-of-ephesians/adoption/). Martin’s is notable for its emphasis on union with Christ as the ground of adoption; Lloyd-Jones’ for its stress on the forensic nature of the concept. Both are as experiential and doxological as a homiletical treatment of this theme ought to be. ↩︎
8. https://geoffthomas.org/index.php/gtsermons/adopted-as-the-children-of-god/. The present author was there when the sermon was preached, and recalls vividly the impression made on the congregation by this moving final point of application. ↩︎
9. Hugh Martin, in his aforementioned sermon, reflects movingly on the present unrecognisableness of the children of God: “A cross lies heavy on our shoulder, rather than a diadem shining on our head. No palm of victory is ours, but the trembling and the toil of weary battle. Diseases grapple with us, having no respect for our adoption. Death at last confronts us as the victims of the loathsome grave, as if we must say unto corruption, not to God, ‘Thou art my father,’ and call the worm our sister rather than that the Son of God should call us brethren…. Alas, we feel, O wretched men that we are, we feel daily the painful incongruity, the deep apparent contradiction between our high relation to God as his sons and our present state, as if we were the slaves of time and time’s mean and sad and vile conditions” (Martin, op. cit., 237-238). ↩︎
10. John Piper, Brothers, We Are Not Professionals: A Plea to Pastors for Radical Ministry (Fearn, Ross-shire: Christian Focus Publications Ltd., 2003), 261. ↩︎
11. Benjamin B. Warfield, ‘The Purpose of the Seminary,’ in Selected Shorter Writings, vol. 1, ed. John E. Meeter (Phillipsburg, N.J.: P&R Publishing, 2001), 376. ↩︎