Daily Devotional
"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!”"
Romans 8:15
If the Father truly gives good things to those who ask, why is prayer so often our last resort instead of our first? Here is the diagnosis: somewhere deep down, we are not sure what kind of Father we have. What you believe about the Father shapes how you pray, and for many of us, if we are honest, the belief underneath our prayerlessness is doubt about His heart.
Dane Ortlund calls this the orphan mindset. The battle of the Christian life, he says, is getting up each morning and replacing our natural orphan mindset with a mindset of full and free adoption into the family of God. The orphan scrounges. The orphan figures it out alone. The orphan does not believe the Father will come through, so he takes matters into his own hands, running himself into the ground trying to make life work. And the surest X-ray of an orphan heart is a prayerless life: self sufficient, anxious, exhausted, praying only after everything else has failed.
But Paul says something staggering to everyone in Christ: you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear. You received the Spirit of adoption, and that Spirit teaches you to cry the child’s word, Abba, Father. Adoption is not a feeling you work up; it is a legal and loving reality God has already accomplished for you in His Son. The invitation of this passage is to live in what is already true. Stop scrounging. Stop scrapping. You have a Father, and He knows what you need before you ask.
Today's Challenge
Look honestly at the past month: has prayer been your first resort or your last? What does that pattern reveal about whether you have been living as a child or as an orphan? Where are you currently scrounging, trying to secure by self effort something only the Father can give? What would it look like to ask Him for it today?
Prayer
Abba, Father, forgive me for living like an orphan when You have made me Your child. I have scrounged and scrapped and worried as if I had no one to go to. Thank You for the Spirit of adoption who teaches me to call You Father. This morning I lay down my self sufficiency. I bring You the things I have been trying to fix alone, and I ask You, as a child asks, to provide. Amen.
