I have talked with a lot of believers about prayer over thirty years, and the ones who have quit rarely quit over theology. They quit over a question they never said out loud.
Am I actually welcome here?
Not welcome in the abstract. Welcome this morning, after last night. Welcome with this specific record, in this specific condition, with the thing I did in March still sitting there unresolved. A man who is not sure he has standing will keep praying for a while out of habit, and then the habit will thin, and one day he will notice he has not really said anything to God in months.
Every technique in the world is useless until that question is settled. So we settle it now, before we go one step further into this series.
The Hired Man Rehearses His Speech
Luke 15 gives us a boy in a pigpen working on a script.
I will arise and go to my father, and will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you, and I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired servants.”
Luke 15:18-19 NKJV
He has it memorized by the time he hits the road. And it is a good speech. It is honest, it is humble, and every line of it is true.
He never gets to finish it. The father is already running before the boy clears the property line, and the robe and the ring and the sandals go on a son who is still wearing the smell of a pigpen. The speech about hired servants dies in his throat because the category no longer exists in that house.
Most of us pray the first half of that speech every day. Father, I have sinned, I am not worthy. All true. And then we tack on the part the father never accepted. So treat me accordingly. Give me the servant’s portion. I will stand out here by the gate.
The Word Both Sides Get Wrong
Paul uses one word twice to explain what changed, and he leaves it untranslated in Aramaic both times, in letters written to Greek readers who did not speak Aramaic. That is a deliberate act. He is quoting something he expects them to recognize.
For you did not receive the spirit of bondage again to fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption by whom we cry out, “Abba, Father.”
Romans 8:15 NKJV
Abba (ἀββά), Strong’s G5, is Aramaic. You have probably heard it preached as Daddy, and that translation deserves a careful correction, because it has been oversold. The claim that abba is baby talk does not survive contact with the sources. Grown men used it of their fathers. It shows up in legal and formal settings in the Aramaic material we have. It is not the coo of a toddler.
But do not overcorrect into coldness either. Abba is the word a son uses inside the house. It is family address, not title. The distance between abba and the formal language of a subject approaching a sovereign is real, and Paul is putting the family word in the mouth of a former slave.
Now look at where else that word appears in the New Testament. Mark 14:36. A garden, at night, a man on the ground with blood in his sweat.
And He said, “Abba, Father, all things are possible for You. Take this cup away from Me; nevertheless, not what I will, but what You will.”
Mark 14:36 NKJV
Jesus used that word in the worst hour of His life. And the Spirit now puts the same word in your mouth. That is the argument Paul is making, and it is not a small one.
Notice the verb attached to it, too. We cry out, krazō (κράζω), G2896. It is not a polite word. It is used of a raven’s call, of a man shouting in the street, of the demoniac screaming across the water. The word for how a son addresses his father in prayer is a word for a shout. There is nothing decorous about it.
Adoption Was a Legal Act, Not a Feeling
The word Paul pairs with abba is huiothesia (υἱοθεσία), G5206. It is a compound. Son-placing. And Paul’s readers in Rome knew exactly what it meant, because Roman adoption was a courtroom procedure with consequences that make our version look thin.
| Term | Strong’s | Force |
|---|---|---|
| abba | G5 | Aramaic family address for a father. Used by sons of any age, inside the house. |
| huiothesia | G5206 | Adoption. Literally the placing of a son. A legal transfer of family, name, and inheritance. |
| krazō | G2896 | To cry out, to shout aloud. Not a whisper and not a formula. |
| parrēsia | G3954 | Freedom of speech. The right of a citizen to say everything, plainly, in the assembly. |
Under Roman law the adopted son’s old debts were cancelled. His previous family had no further claim on him. He took the new father’s name and became heir alongside any natural sons, and the adoption could not be reversed by bad behavior. A man could be adopted in the morning and disappoint his father by supper, and he was still the son at supper.
That is the legal instrument sitting underneath your prayer life. Your standing before God is not a report card that gets recalculated each morning. It was settled in a courtroom you were not even present for, by a Judge who then adopted the defendant.
You Have the Right to Speak
Hebrews carries the same truth into different language.
Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need.
Hebrews 4:16 NKJV
Boldly is parrēsia (παρρησία), G3954, and it is a political word before it is a religious one. In a Greek city it named the right of a free citizen to stand in the assembly and say everything he had to say, plainly, without editing himself for his betters. A slave did not have parrēsia. A foreigner did not have it. Citizens did.
And notice the timing in that verse. You come boldly to get mercy. You do not get mercy first and then earn the right to come. The boldness runs ahead of the cleanup, which is precisely backward from how most of us operate.
The writer of Hebrews had spent his whole life knowing that a curtain hung between the people and the presence, and that a man who walked through it uninvited died. Then he watched that curtain tear from the top down, which is to say from the side no man could reach.
What This Changes Monday Morning
If you are one of the people I described at the top, here is the practical difference.
Stop opening your prayers by relitigating your standing. You are not required to make the case for admittance every time. That case is closed. When you come in carrying something you did, bring it in as a son bringing a wreck to his father, not as a defendant filing an appeal. Both are honest. Only one of them is true to the arrangement Christ purchased.
And when the accusation comes, and it will, sometimes in your own voice, answer it with the adoption papers rather than with your performance. Your performance will lose that argument every single time. It is supposed to.
The boy in the pigpen was right about everything except the last line. He was unworthy. He had sinned against heaven and against his father. And the ring went on his finger anyway.
Going Deeper
Read Romans 8:14-17 and Galatians 4:4-7 together, then read Hebrews 10:19-22. Three passages, one argument. Access is not a mood you work yourself into. It is a status somebody else paid for.
Next in the series, what happens when a man uses that standing on behalf of somebody else. Abraham argued with God over a city, and God let him.
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