Free Spiritual Slavery to Spiritual Sonship by Jack Frost Page A

subject to our own mission rather than living life to experience God’s love and to give it away.
Choose Father’s Mission
    Home is always there for us. By “home,” I mean the place where we find rest from our striving in God’s unconditional love and acceptance. In Christ, we are forgiven and loved, and yet we can still choose our own way. Remember that intimacy precedes fruitfulness. We can’t have a fully meaningful, purposeful, and productive life and healthy relationships until we embrace a heart of sonship with our Father—until we choose to be subject to His mission and find in Him the warm, deep intimacy we have always hungered for. It is in being subject to Father’s mission that we find His strength and life flowing through us and humbling us so that love and intimacy become the motivating factors of our life and ministry.
    It was this kind of loving and intimate relationship with God that Paul had in mind when he prayed:
    … that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God
(Ephesians 3:17-19).
    When we begin to displace our orphan spirit by receiving and embracing the spirit of sonship, putting the Great Commandment ahead of the Great Commission will become perfectly natural. Much of what passes today for Great Commission ministry and evangelism has been influenced by orphan thinking, resulting in placing the Great Commission ahead of the Great Commandment. The brokenness of so many families of Christian leaders evidence that fact. Our tendency is to live by the love of law instead of by the law of love. Is it any wonder, then, that the church of today, despite having greater resources available than ever before in history, has not turned the world upside down the way the apostles and other early Christians did in the Book of Acts?
    If we are more concerned with ministry than with the needs of our family, then whose mission are we subject to? Satan’s plan is to weaken the nations, and he does this by weakening families first. If satan cannot stop us from doing good things, he will keep us so busy doing good things for others that we neglect our own children who end up feeling like they don’t have a place in our heart, and they too become spiritual orphans.
    It’s time to displace this cycle. It’s time to unfasten the lifeline and abandon the wind-tossed, sleet-whipped bow on the sea of fear for the warmth and safety of the wheelhouse. It’s time to stop and wake up from the “numb-numb-ville” of being subject to the enemy’s death-dealing mission and take up the mantle of life asbeloved sons and daughters whose hearts are focused upon Father’s mission.
To Be Like Jesus
    In the eighth chapter of Romans, Paul talks about this idea of sonship:
    … those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship. And by Him we cry, “Abba, Father.” The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ
(Romans 8:14-17a).
    Here we find the very heart of sonship. But in order to come into this place of sonship, we have to be led by the Spirit of God, who is a fathering Spirit. He is not a Spirit of slavery leading us into a life of fear again, but the Spirit of sonship. This Spirit of sonship is a Spirit of intimacy and innocence.
Abba
is a Hebrew term of endearment that essentially means the same as “Daddy.” It is a term of intimacy, spoken by children who are in the presence of a loving Father whom they love and trust. In Daddy’s presence there is no fear, no bondage, no oppression, and no anxiety.
    The