In the last issue I talked about some of the amazing and divine things that happened on a few different birthdays of mine. I was born August 16, back in the 1900s as my kids like to say, in 1987 to be exact. About 18 years later, in October of 2005, I was “born again.” I had an awakening. I found Jesus. Whatever you want to call it, everything changed from that point on. Serious addictions to drugs, pornography, and existential-philosophical navel-gazing all broke, and a new day of hope, love, and light broke forth in my life. I was a child of God and I knew it.

Now, in the last issue, I talked about how everyone (including pre-October 2005 Nick Padovani) is a child of God. In fact, it was the words, “Son, come home” that drew my heart to God on that fateful October night, leaving me in a puddle of joyful tears in my Long Island dormitory. So I want to expand on this and bring more clarity to what it exactly means to be “born again.” As I said in the last article, many are championing humanity’s true identity and the reality that the Father, Son, and Spirit already fill and sustain every human being on the planet. But I want to expand on the issue of repentance and the actual transformation that can occur through it.

So I told you about the diamond on the carrot that showed up on my 30th birthday. This was an absolute affirmation of the original blessing of God’s life and love that exists in every single person on the planet. Now I want to add something here real quick: We don’t need miraculous signs to teach us theology. On the other hand, clear signs from God can be helpful to show us things that were already in Scripture and yet our limited and skewed perspectives block us from seeing them. This is what happened to Peter on a rooftop when God gave him a vision and told him to call no man “unclean” (Acts 10:28). This was a radical shift for Peter in his understanding of God and the Old Covenant scriptures. Yet the vision corresponded with a wild and “coincidental” sign of unclean Gentiles showing up at his front door right at that moment. Like Peter, all of us have filters in reading the Word and sometimes it takes a miraculous act of God to break some of those unhealthy lenses.

So I want to share something else that happened, only two months after the diamond on the carrot. This was in the month of what many would call my “spiritual birthday.” In October of that year, I was in Israel with my best friend and Elisha’s Riddle co-founder Dylan DeMarsico when something undeniably divine and hilarious occurred. Many of you know this story…

Love and Aloha

Upon our arrival to the Holy Land, Dylan and I had been exploring one of the funniest translations of Scripture we’d ever seen. My brother Adam in Texas had recently come across The Hawaiian Translation and shared it with me, and when Dylan and I arrived in Israel we found ourselves reading the following words from God the Father to God the Son:

“You my boy! I really get love an aloha fo you, an I stay good inside cuz a you!”

(Mark 1:11 Hawaiian Translation)

God gets love and aloha for the Son! These are the words of the Father spoken blissfully to his Son in Hawai’i Creole English. We were cracking up, and at the same time celebrating how this was not only God’s affirmation of Jesus but his affirmation of us. We are his sons as well, made in the wondrous image of Christ. We were talking about this for two days when on the third full day of our trip, God surprised the orphan hell out of us. We went to the Jordan River for baptisms, a place commonly traversed by spiritual pilgrims all over the world. Along the banks of the river is a very long wall that follows many different spots where churches and other small groups can go into the water and baptize people. On this wall is the same scripture written in nearly every language the world, whether French, Italian, Japanese, etc. Over 85 nations are represented! The scripture is from the story of Jesus’s baptism in the Jordan.

When we got into the water I was called to a prayer line just to the side of where people were getting immersed. Dylan happened to be one of the first to get baptized and then waded over to us so we could pray over him. As he approached me, I looked up to our little section of the river and the part of the wall that just so happened to be right in front of us. To my utter amazement, I saw the words we had been laughing about for nearly three days. Here’s the picture Dylan took of that part of the wall:

“You my boy! I really get love an aloha fo you, an I stay good inside cuz a you!”

We were undone! It was such a wild experience. And on top of the crazy fact that this happened, it was also amazing that Dylan and I were both 30 years old at this time. The scriptures say Jesus was about 30 when he was baptized in the Jordan River. So there we were, in that same spot, and God the Father was speaking these words over us, in a unique dialect that felt like a best friend using an inside joke to tell you he loves you. So glorious.

The Spirit of Adoption

Now let’s talk a little theology here. To reiterate–“signs” like these don’t create new dogma, but they do have the potential to radically affirm things God has already revealed. I began to explore some of these things in the last article when I brought up Jesus’s baptism. I pointed out that Jesus received the Holy Spirit on that day. This is a wild concept to think through. Jesus already had the Holy Spirit right from birth. However, something happened in that infamous river that changed the course of human history. Jesus did an act of repentance on our behalf and received an empowering “anointing” of the Holy Spirit. It was only after that point that we see Jesus moving in “power” and doing miracles and all other kinds of amazing things.

What we see is that Jesus was stepping into his identity and the Holy Spirit came and testified–or confirmed–this reality by empowering him to walk out his divine sonship. Again, he was already a divine Son, but Jesus had “emptied himself” of his divine glory to become fully man and show each one of us the pathway into God’s purposes for our lives. (You can read Philippians 2:6-8 for more insight on this.)

The main point here is that we are looking at salvation as something more than a person suddenly turning into a child of God. People already are children of God. However, there is a place of surrender and returning (“repenting”) where something absolutely real happens in the same way something real happened to Jesus in that beautiful river. This has to do with the Spirit of Adoption and it is what Jesus himself experienced at 30 years old.

A Rite of Passage

(The following is adapted from the 17th chapter of The Song of the Ages Pt. 3…)

Today, most people read the word adoption and think of the legal process whereby a child is placed in a family that is not of their biological origin. This is a powerful thing and perhaps one of the best expressions of love found in the world. However, it does not convey the deepest meaning behind this ancient terminology. The apostle Paul, who utilized this term in the New Testament, was using a common Greek word that often meant something very different to the people of his day. It is the word “huiothesia” and it described something that happened to a young boy who already had a family.

In order to unpack this word, let’s look at one of the key verses that introduces us to this concept:

For all who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God. For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, “Abba! Father!”

(Romans 8:14-15)

Paul is writing to the heart of the Roman Empire. As such, he’s using a phrase that would have meant something very specific in the mind of a Roman. In that culture, there was a particular path laid out for young boys when they were ready to enter into manhood. This was determined by their father and typically happened around the age of fourteen. A boy would undergo a formal ceremony involving other adult males from his family, during which he would remove the toga he wore throughout his entire childhood. In its place, he would be given a new, larger, and more expensive toga—the toga virilis. “The toga of a man.”

After being clothed with this new garment, the young man would be publicly acknowledged as an adult son in his household and then given new privileges. He was now allowed to marry, conduct business in his own name, and was given the right to join the local assembly and vote. This was the moment of huiothesia, or “adoption,” as our English translators put it.

The ancient world was filled with many such rites of passage. For the most part, these pathways into adulthood have been stripped away from our modern world. The awkward in-between phase from child to adult now known as “the teenage years” is a very recent idea. For a vast portion of the world’s history, teenagers were simply considered adults. Their transition into adulthood was a serious thing, marked with ceremonies and tasks that created a powerful and affirming experience for a child. Through this process, the boy would be confirmed as a mature son and empowered with certain rights and privileges that come with that title.

The Roman concept is not far from the modern Bar Mitzvah, a Jewish ceremony where a twelve or thirteen year old boy is acknowledged as a “son of the Torah.” This dates back to older Hebraic rites of passage where young boys would be recognized as a man in front of their community. They would then begin to be more involved with their father’s trade, taking the first steps toward eventually taking it over. Hence you have Jesus in the temple at twelve-years-old telling Mary and Joseph He needed to be about His Father’s business (Lk. 2:49).

While the modern process of adoption can be applied to the word huiothesia as well, the context of Paul’s use of this word would suggest something much different in the minds of his readers. Paul was not writing about how we become God’s kids through a legal process. Rather, he was speaking about how we rise up into the full stature of spiritual adulthood.

Coming into Fullness

This is where we come into a deeper understanding of “salvation.” This is an understanding that doesn’t water down the true identity of every single person, no matter where they are in their relationship with God. Salvation is about unlocking the very real and yet still potential reality of Christ inside of every human being. Remember, Christ is the image of God (Colossians 1:15). That image is something living and real. The image of God, Christ Himself, is in every single person.

Nonetheless, it is when a person awakens to God’s love, when they change their mind and return to the open arms of their true Father, that a special gift is released into their lives. The Holy Spirit comes to bring them into adoption, into spiritual fullness and adulthood. This gift empowers a person to be who they truly are and to rise into their full potential.

Salvation is then about Christ being made manifest in human lives. This is why people confuse good works with salvation, because they’re somewhat right! True salvation looks like Jesus, the One who does amazingly good works. But this also explains the other side of the coin that salvation is a pure gift that has already been released to humanity. All people are loved and forgiven by God through the finished work of the cross. Salvation has already been freely given. So it is by trust (faith) that a person steps into this and begins to live it out. In this way, they are “adopted” into sonship and daughterhood. They rise from spiritual infancy and begin the journey of living as mature children of God.

In this understanding, we also see what it means to be “saved.” We need to be saved from deception, bondage, and the lies that hide our true selves. As the Scriptures plainly state, Jesus came to save us from our sin, and this would include all of its soul-destroying consequences. So this is not some strange new doctrine but rather apostolic Christianity, and we’ll expand upon it in the final article of this Spirit in All series. Believe it or not, I have one more crazy story from the year that I turned 30 that will remarkably sum all of this up.

Until then… Grace and Glory to you.