Praying as Adopted Children

As Jesus confronts a hypocritical way of praying in Matthew 6, he makes a profound statement about the relationship of kingdom disciples to the King when he begins his model prayer with the words, “Our Father.” To be sure, the concept of God’s fatherhood and the corresponding ideas of adoption and sonship do not originate in Jesus’ teaching. For example, Israel is called God’s firstborn son (Exod 4:22; Hos 11:1), and the Davidic king was designated God’s son (Ps 2:7). Nevertheless, something new does arrive with the coming of the Lord Jesus, and Herman Ridderbos puts it like this: “God’s fatherhood and the sonship … of the faithful are the realization of the communion in which the remission of sins is brought about.”[1] Because the remission of sins happens in and through Jesus Christ, adoption becomes a present reality just as much as it is a future hope for the people of God. That is why Jesus can instruct his disciples to pray today with the words, “Our Father.”

Before turning to the effect that adoption ought to have on our prayers, it is worth defining adoption first. Francis Turretin defines adoption as “a juridical act of God by which from his mere mercy, he adopts into his family through faith in Christ those whom he elected to salvation from eternity and bestows upon them the name and right of sons as to inheritance.”[2] Adoption is closely tied to justification and fills out the consequences of being made right with God. Not only are believers acquitted by the Judge; they are called children of God and welcomed by their Father. Thus, the doctrine of adoption fuels an important aspect of our Christian liberty, namely our “free access to God,” which in Christ and by our adoption as sons and daughters allows a “greater boldness of access to the throne of grace” (WCF, 20.1).

That bold access is realized in our prayers to God as our Father, and that adoption changes the way in which we pray. So, Herman Ridderbos notes that while we pray in the Lord’s Prayer to the King that his kingdom would come, we pray in that way also according to God’s fatherhood. Therefore, Ridderbos says that God’s “fatherhood imparts to the gospel of the kingdom a tender, trustworthy and winning tone. … And this is done in a way that expresses the communion and loving care of God for his children. God stoops down to his children and speaks to them intimately.” The net effect is, according to Ridderbos, this: “Whoever comes to God need not approach him in a cringing way and with the servile fear of a heathen calling to his god.”[3]

Indeed, the power that adoption works on our prayers, since adoption is joined to justification, i.e. the forgiveness of our sins, is that our performance need not impair our prayers. Herman Bavinck, therefore, writes, “The forgiveness of his sins, the hope for the future, the certainty concerning eternal salvation, do not depend upon the degree of holiness which he has achieved in life, but are firmly rooted in the grace of God and in the redemption which is in Christ Jesus. If these benefits had to derive their certainty from the good works of the Christian, they would always, even unto death, remain unsure, for even the holiest of men have only a small beginning of perfect obedience.”[4] Similarly, our prayers would remain unsure. But as it stands, we may approach God as Father with a degree of boldness that is only possible in Christ, who has secured our salvation.

Finally, we should note that praying as adopted children also includes the unfathomable benefit of the Holy Spirit praying along with and even for us. As Herman Ridderbos puts it, the Spirit is the one “who maintains this living communion” with God. “He comes from God to awaken in the hearts of God’s people the true consciousness of children, but he also mounts up, as it were, from the hearts of the children to God, because in their inability to find the right words in prayer he enters in for them with unutterable groanings; and God, the great searcher of hearts, will judge them according to this holy intention of the Spirit which is acceptable to God (Rom. 8:26ff).”[5]

May we, then, pray to God our Father as adopted children with all freedom and in humility but with great boldness according to our secure status.

[1] Herman N Ridderbos, The Coming of the Kingdom, ed. Raymond O Zorn, trans. H. de Jongste (P&R Publishing, 1962), 232.

[2] Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, ed. James T. Dennison, trans. George Musgrave Giger, 3 vols. (P&R Publishing, 1992), 2:667.

[3] Ridderbos, The Coming of the Kingdom, 240.

[4] Herman Bavinck, The Wonderful Works of God: Instruction in the Christian Religion According to the Reformed Confession, trans. Henry Zylstra (Westminster Seminary Press, 2019), 447.

[5] Herman N Ridderbos, Paul: An Outline of His Theology (W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1997), 201–2.