Image: Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, 1606-1669. Apostle Paul, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt University Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://act.library.vanderbilt.edu/artworks/55240 [retrieved August 23, 2026]. Original source: https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.1198.html.
Every family is different. There are as many ways to be family as there are families. But when we think of how families ought to be, what comes to mind? (Wait for responses.) A place that feels like home, where everyone has everyone else’s back, where you know you’re loved.
But all of us come from families that didn’t live up to the ideal picture. Some of us came from families where love and respect were mutual, and some of us did not. Some of us come from families where loyalty was freely given and some of us came from families where loyalty is demanded. Some of us grew up in a safe, orderly home, and others of us grew up in dangerous, abusive, or disorderly homes. Yet, that ideal picture for a family still lingers in our minds.
And our deep desire for that family ideal can make us vulnerable to manipulation. Corporations use family language all the time. Unfortunately, when the manager says, “We’re like a family here,” that often means, “We’re going to make demands on your time that only your real family has a right to make,” or “We expect you to make sacrifices for the company’s bottom line.” While there certainly are companies that take care of their people, it doesn’t change the fact that at the end of the day, a corporation is a corporation, not a family. There are few families that would put a member on a “performance improvement plan”, as tempting as it might be sometimes!
The language gets even trickier when it comes to congregations. Congregations are built on family language, especially if it’s a smaller congregation like ours. We all have a picture for how a congregation, a particular iteration of the family of God, should be. We think that the people should always be kind to each other, they should always show grace, there should always be peace and love. And then our fallen humanity shows up, as it inevitably does! Someone hurts someone else, someone holds a grudge, someone acts selfishly. By the way, Paul’s letters, particularly the ones to the Corinthians, are filled with case studies of fallen people trying and often failing to live together as church. When the ideal picture for a congregational family is shattered, the fallout can be tremendous. Perhaps that’s the reason why family and church fights are often the worst. There are so many expectations placed on each other to act like perfect saints, when the reality is that we are all still sinners, too. And while we dare not minimize cases of real abuse and harm done in the church, sometimes the line “The church is full of hypocrites,” gets a little old. Yes, it is! It always has been and always will be until Jesus returns. And there’s always room for more!
So, when Paul writes today about adoption into the Lord’s family, we might wonder what that means among a bunch of hypocritical, human-all-too-human people like us. And if family language is all too often used, abused, and misused, we might wonder what family language, used for the people of God, might even mean.
Paul tells the Galatians that when all of them, Paul included, were minors, they were enslaved to the elemental principles of the cosmos, or as our translation has it, to “the world’s system”. This means that before the gospel came to them, their consciences were under the sway of the various powers, systems, and laws that kept us in line. For the Galatians, this might have included the various gods, temple cults, and sacrificial systems that upheld their social order. For Paul, it means the Torah, which is an outrageous thing for him to say. Paul is saying that even the Law of God is a fallen creature. No wonder people got so angry at him! While still “holy, just, and good”, and while retaining functions that pertain to our existence in this fallen realm, including maintaining civil order and revealing our sin to us, the Law on its own, without the gospel, can be quite literally satanic, in the original sense of that term.
Let me back up a little. In the book of Job, Satan shows up to accuse Job of not being as faithful as he appears to be. The name in Hebrew is literally “the satan”, or “the accuser”. There, Satan is not so much an agent of utter evil (although he does act evilly toward Job) as he is God’s prosecuting attorney. There’s a lawyer joke there somewhere. The point is this: the law—any system of law, whether Torah or the U.S. Code—has the function of accusation. And it had jurisdiction over our whole selves, physical, spiritual, conscience, everything.
But when Christ came, that whole system was turned upside down. Law does retain its functions of accusation, to be sure. It keeps civil order, and it can even, in some cases, provide us with a guide for how to act. We reviewed that with our series on the Ten Commandments. But it does not have the last word over us. It does not have the final word of judgment. Rather, Jesus Christ has freed us for something better—adoption into his family as God’s sons, daughters, and children.
God’s family is led not by compulsion or force, but by his Holy Spirit, poured out upon us in baptism. At this font or one like it, we received that same Spirit and were adopted into God’s family. And this family is not like any other family, whether biological or church. This family consists of the communion of saints, living and dead, across every time and space. This family has a Father who loves us with an everlasting love (Jer. 31:3), who is slow to anger and abounding in loyal lovingkindness (Ps. 103:8), a Father who sent his only Son for us—Jesus, our brother. And because Jesus was born into the same conditions all humans are born into and because of his ministry, suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension, he has become what Paul will call in Romans “the firstborn in a large family” (Rom. 8:29). While the world’s system still has some rule over us in this fallen realm, it doesn’t have the final rule. Jesus does. And God in Jesus offers us constant forgiveness in Word and Sacrament, which we desperately need in this world. And one day, we will be raised into the eternal family of our God and Father, where tears will be no more.
So, how do we think of the church as a family in the here-and-now? The church is God’s family, larger than any one congregation, greater than any one pastor, musician, lay leader, or team. The church belongs to God, not to us. The congregation is also not a family in the same way our “real” families are. Those families can make demands of us in ways that would not always be appropriate for a congregation to do. Finally, the church is made up of sinful people. We will have to continue practicing holding each other accountable and offering forgiveness until the day Jesus returns. Yet, we know that in the end, it won’t be our judgment that matters. It will be the love of God, which “brings life from the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Rom. , that does. Amen.
© 2026, David M. Fleener. Permission granted to copy and adapt original material herein for non-commercial purposes.
