Growing Up In Christ

“And because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying out ‘Abba, Father!’” (Galatians 4:6

St. Paul’s letter to Galatians was not to a single parish, but to many in central Asia Minor. He was disturbed; because he thought that he had left them with the awareness that they were liberated from following the Old Testament legalisms that our Lord Jesus Himself renounced as unnecessary and oppressive. St. Paul was himself a Pharisee, one of those who specially condemned our Lord for not following the letter of the Law of Moses; yet he came to understand the limits of the Law and the freedom of grace.

St. Paul writing to the Galatians insisted that they ought to have realized that they were no longer infants in the faith who had to be ruled and disciplined for every action, nor were they slaves, to be obedient to a master. Rather, they ought to understand that they were children of God—not in the same way as Jesus Christ Himself was, for He is the Son of God. As such, He never had a beginning, since He was eternal, but He chose to set aside all that He was by nature in being God, and entered the world as one of us. One benefit of that was that He redeemed His entire fellow Jews who were under the Law, and He brought into His fellowship of faithful those who were outside of the Law, such as most of our pagan ancestors. In essence He adopted all of us into His spiritual family.

Now we are no longer foreigners and outsiders. We are given a new birth. Recall when Nicodemus came to the Lord at night asking to see the kingdom of God (John 3:1), and when he was told that he must be born again if his wish is to be granted, Nicodemus asked the obvious question: How can one already born be given a second birth? Our Lord Jesus told him that he must be born of the Holy Spirit.

You and I were born again when we were baptized and chrismated, meaning the Holy Spirit consecrated us. Now we are sisters and brothers of our Lord Jesus, and therefore children of the Father. Since the time of our Chrismation, the Holy Spirit dwells in our hearts, as St. Paul reminds us in the above passage.

It may happen that you may fall into the temptations of our world and forsake the true teachings of the Holy Orthodox Church, drawn into the nonsense that passes for wisdom by sectarians who have so many words without much validity, writing books that are on our library’s shelves, preaching on the airwaves via television and radio, and who draw you into the confusion of these times. Nevertheless, when you cry out in the despair of your anguish like a child who knows that he or she is loved without having given any reason for being loved other than the awareness that a loving God has a mysterious capacity for loving all whom He created, and your soul cries out: Abba, meaning “Daddy,” or “Papa,” it’s not really you wailing in grief, but the Holy Spirit residing in your heart who knows much better than you what it is you really require for your salvation. It is the Spirit within you crying out to the heavenly Father, aware that despite being beyond all comprehension, or as the Creed states it: “inconceivable, invisible, incomprehensible, ever existing and eternally the same,” that mysterious unknown God loves you more than any earthly parent is capable of loving. God is Person, and as such He feels your slightest need and is able to comfort you with inexpressible tenderness and affection, if you will only stop struggling with solving your problems yourself, and open your soul to Him, entrusting yourself to His precious care and unsurpassable wisdom.