Tag: image of God

353. God’s Offspring – or Adopted Children?

Mike Parsons –

God’s desire is for us to embody love because we are made in His image—He is love, light and spirit. Our spirits are light, and we’re designed to love just as God does. The highest goal is to give love, reflecting God’s image. When we follow an independent path, it distorts love into a need and driving force, leading us to seek love from others rather than giving it ourselves.

A common misunderstanding is that we were separated from God and need adoption back into His family. This view, often held in evangelical circles, is flawed. God never separated from us; we were never outside His family. So adoption is our coming of age within that family, not rescue from abandonment. Biblical adoption is about maturity and coming into full authority from the Father, not placing orphans into new families. Genesis 1:26 shows that God created us in His image and blessed us to be fruitful and rule on the earth. Adam’s choice to walk independently disrupted this plan, but now, in Christ, we are redefined by our identity in Him.

Any idea that Jesus is the true Son and we are merely adopted obscures our true identity: we have always been God’s children, made in His image and likeness. Our perception of rejection or abandonment is false. Romans 8:14 says, “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.” The Spirit is in everyone, guiding us all, even if we don’t always follow. When Jesus breathed the Holy Spirit into His disciples, He revealed their true identity. We all have received God’s Spirit, confirming that we are His children and helping us understand who we really are.

So our Western and Roman concept of ‘adoption’ might not fully capture what the Bible word means. Some interpret adoption as something that happens when we accept salvation or when God adopts us. However, this interpretation can also imply that we were once orphans or outside God’s family, which isn’t accurate. Romans 8:15-17 explains that we have received the Spirit of adoption, not as a sign of previous separation but to affirm our existing sonship. The Spirit confirms that we are already God’s children and co-heirs with Christ. This adoption isn’t about coming from outside into the family but recognising our inherent identity as God’s offspring.

God has always been our origin; we just need to rediscover this truth. Romans 8:14-17 in the Mirror Bible describes the Spirit leading us into the fullness of life in God, showing that we are His children, not through fear but through a relationship with Abba Father.

And Jesus’ suffering was for our benefit, not a requirement for entering our inheritance. The idea that we must suffer to gain inheritance is a misunderstanding. Jesus suffered so that we wouldn’t have to face the same trials. We are not orphans; Jesus assured us that He would not leave us as orphans but would come to us, showing that God dwells within us and is not distant or rejecting. If we teach that people are orphans or rejected by God, we distort the gospel and the true nature of salvation. The message of salvation reflects God’s nature as loving and inclusive, not as one who condemns or separates.

We have the rights and responsibilities of sonship, as part of God’s royal family. Peter tells us that we’re privileged to represent God on earth, showing others what He is like through our relationship with Him. Initially, Israel was meant to fulfil this role, but their system became law-based rather than grace-based. Romans 8:19 reveals that creation eagerly awaits the revealing of God’s children. If we see ourselves as ‘lesser’ adopted children, we miss out on our role as co-creators with God. Being part of a royal family gives us access to the Heavenly Palace, where we’re seated with Jesus and can engage with God intimately in His presence.

Despite being taught that we’re orphans needing adoption, the truth is we’ve always been part of God’s family. According to Ephesians 1:4, our restored face-to-face relationship with God is a done deal, and God’s love will eventually bring everyone to this realisation. Our true identity means we don’t need to live like orphans. We can experience our origin in first love, knowing God as our loving Father. The Spirit confirms this, enabling us to call God “Abba Father.”

Picture a door in your spirit.
God is knocking: invite Him in.
As He enters, He hugs you and breathes His life into you.
Feel His heartbeat and embrace.
Know that you’re home.

He whispers into your heart,
sharing His love and affirmation,
telling you how treasured and loved you are.

312. How We Are Wired To Restore Creation

Mike Parsons – 

Our redemptive gift is the particular way we are wired that enables us to engage effectively in restoring creation. God intends us to be involved in that restoration as sons and co-creators with Jesus.

[I am reading from my book Into the Dark Cloud]

My redemptive gift is prophet/teacher. When I look at the world, I am looking to see how things work. In every situation I want to understand how it has come about and what has occurred. What can I learn? How can I explain that? What is behind that event?

As a child, I was always inquisitive and loved taking things apart to discover how they worked. Of course, at five or six years old, I couldn’t put most of them back together again. My mum was always pulling her hair out:

“You’ve broken it.”
“I wanted to see how it worked.”
“Well, now it doesn’t work at all!”

Later, when I discovered movies, I was always drawn to tales of quests and adventures of discovery, because that is how I am made.

Our redemptive gift shapes the way we see and interact with the world,
and therefore helps to determine the course of our lives. I may see things one way: someone else will experience the same situation or event and consider it through the lens of their own redemptive gift.

Jesus is the fullness of all the redemptive gifts, and we would all say we desire to become more Christ-like. In that case, we may sometimes feel limited or defined by our redemptive gift, but that is just our soul’s natural thinking.

As we become conformed to His image, we will demonstrate more of the gifts; but initially each of us has a primary and a secondary gift, shaping how we think, feel, and act by default. We did not have to learn it; it is just how we are. This gift is put into us at conception, into our soul. When Adam became a living being or a living soul, he was created with a redemptive gift.

All of us are creative in some way, whether we recognise it or not, since we are all made in God’s image. Some will express creativity in art, poetry or music, some in science, industry, commerce or other ways. That creativity within us derives from the image of God in us – but ultimately, He wants us to be doing the things that Jesus did (and greater ones).

Key takeaway

Jesus is the fullness of all the redemptive gifts; as we become increasingly conformed to His image, we will demonstrate more of the gifts.

232. The Greatest Scandal of the Age

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott

New things

“Behold, the former things have come to pass,
Now I declare new things;
Before they spring forth I proclaim them to you.”
(Isa 42:9)

Think of everything in your life that has already come to pass… and now God is saying ‘I declare new things’. Everything that is old has gone, everything that may have brought feelings of unworthiness, guilt and shame, and it has all gone because of the power of the cross.

The old things can no longer be of any use to us, if in fact they ever were. God has already decreed and declared for us a new place of relationship. We need to be aware that the old things have gone, so that we can accept the new things that the power of Jesus’ resurrection has opened up for us.

As those who are called to rule and reign as sons of God, we need to know God as our Father, otherwise we will operate as if we were orphans, as if we did not have a relationship with Him. What is more, we are made in God’s image, but if the image we have of Him is distorted then we will act in a distorted way. So if our view of God has Him as angry and vengeful, that is exactly how we will be as sons – and if you look at the world, it is an angry, vengeful place. Much of that has come from the way religion has presented Him: even though people may not ‘believe in God’, that is still the image they have of the God they don’t believe in. So God wants to reveal Himself to us, and to the world, in a completely different way.

Scandal

God spoke to me towards the end of 2016 and said,

“Son, the greatest scandal of the age is about to be exposed. Many will not believe it but the truth of who I am (and therefore who you are as My sons) will be revealed. The lies of religion will be exposed to the pure light of truth. The great I am is about to reveal Himself as the lover of your souls in what will amount to a whole new reality”.

Much that we have believed about God and the version of reality that religion has presented to the church and the world, God is about to expose as a complete lie. And when it is exposed we will be able to see the truth of who God is and who we are.

The sin

We can engage God face to face, because it was never Him who hid from us, only the other way round. When Adam and Eve fell, and God came to find them in the Garden, He did not say ‘What have you done?’ He said, ‘Where are you?’ They were hiding because they were focussed on what they had done, but He was still looking for relationship. The enemy will always try to keep us focussed on what we have done, but God never is.

Sin is not really about behaviour, it is not about what we have done wrong. The most common word for ‘sin’, used 174 times in the New Testament, is ‘hamartia’. It is a noun, not a verb, ‘the sin’ rather than ‘to sin’, and it is not about our ‘doings’ at all. Religion is mostly concerned with ‘doings’: as if all these bad things we have done mean that God does not really like us, and does not want a relationship with us. But whatever we may have done does not affect how God sees us or how much He loves us. We just think it does.

The DIY tree

Sin brings its own consequences. Young’s literal translation of Romans 6:23 says,

For the wages of the sin [is] death, and the gift of God [is] life age-during in Christ Jesus our Lord.

The sin did not need to be punished but forgiven, corrected, dealt with and removed. This is what Jesus accomplished by his death and resurrection. He did not come to deal with our individual actions, as much as He came to deal with sin as a power, something that was at the very root of our situation. It was the sin of Adam in following the DIY path of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, trying to become like God by his own do-it-yourself efforts. That is what Jesus came to deal with; everything else is just a consequence of that.

Although the serpent said “If you eat of this tree you will become like God”, the truth was that Adam was already created in the likeness and image of God. Adam failed to grasp and hold onto his true identity and likeness from God’s perspective. So whilst God has never changed how He sees us, Adam suddenly saw himself as less than he was. In this spiritual blindness about himself and about God, he lost sight of the fact that he shared and participated in God’s own image and likeness.

That blindness has affected everyone ever since. We try to hide and cover up our nakedness with fig leaves because we have believed a lie about how God sees us. We do not see ourselves the way God really sees us or the way He created us to be. The spiritual death we have inherited is fundamentally a loss of relationship with God and a loss of personal identity.

For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive (1 Cor 15:22).

Read that scripture again, and this time consider the two alls. Just as all inherited that spiritual death and blindness from Adam; just as all shared in the spiritual-soul-death that it created, so all share in the victory of the cross and Jesus’ resurrection life.

Love

When we do engage God face to face, we will see what He is really like. God is love. Everything He does is love. Think of that, then compare how religion has depicted Him! Often those non-believers I mentioned earlier seem to be fine with Jesus but they are not so sure about ‘God’. Jesus came to share the truth of who He was and who His Father was. In reality, He is not some sort of schizophrenic, He does not have a split personality. Father, Son and Spirit are in complete unity, and if you have seen Jesus you have seen the Father.

Related articles from Freedom ARC

These blog posts are adapted from Mike’s teaching in the ‘Engaging God‘ subscription programme.

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