“Can I come in?” a quiet voice asked me through my bedroom door. Once I opened it, my sister wordlessly walked past me and sat on the floor in a space against the wall. “Is everything OK?” Her only response was a small “Mm-hmm.” This was a common scene growing up in my childhood home. For my younger sister, my room was sometimes an even more peaceful place than her own. I allowed her the right to be there because I loved her and knew it would help bring her peace and tranquility. No fear would ever make her hesitate to claim that right.
This scene reminds me of how God is toward us as His children. Because of Christ’s accomplishments, we are God’s children, and that position lets us take full advantage of rights and privileges from God. What we have to do is believe we have those rights to claim them. Then our actions will begin to correspond to the spiritual realities of our God-given rights as we renew our minds, or control our thinking to line up with God’s Word.
As a member of an earthly family, we can enjoy certain rights and privileges. The same is true in our spiritual family as children of our heavenly Father, God. Since we received these rights when we became His sons, we can call them sonship rights.
To start, we can see that God gave us righteousness, justification, sanctification, redemption, and the ministry of reconciliation to claim when we became born again.
I Corinthians 1:30:
But of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption.
Righteousness is the God-given justification whereby a person stands in the presence of God without any consciousness of sin, guilt, or shortcomings. We are not only righteous and therefore free from sin in God’s eyes, but we also have the right of justification, which is complete release from the penalty of sin (Romans 3:24). Sanctification means that we are set apart. We were set apart from the unbelievers of this world when we were born again—we are going to heaven and all hell can’t stop us. Redemption is the payment of a ransom; we’ve been bought back from Satan’s power, and we legally belong to God.
II Corinthians 5:18,19:
And all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation;
To wit, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them; and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation.
We also have the right to reconcile others to God, just as we were reconciled to Him. We have been given the right of the ministry of reconciliation, and we have had the word of reconciliation committed to us to tell others how to be reconciled and claim all God has given.
To claim these rights and privileges, we need to believe that we have them. Just like my sister knew she could always access the sanctuary of my bedroom, we can pivot our thoughts away from whatever negatives the world might be saying to what God’s Word says. We can truly believe that our sonship rights are as accessible as the ones we claim in our earthly families. We can control our thinking and stay, or focus, our minds on God’s promises to us.
Philippians 2:5:
Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.
Jesus Christ knew that he was the Son of God. He knew his status and he knew he could claim the rights and privileges given to him. He believed his Father’s Word. We can do the same! When we find ourselves dwelling on past sins or feeling small, we can remember our rights as sons of God and believe them.
Jesus Christ also claimed his rights by staying his mind on God’s Word. Since we can let that same mind be in us, we, too, can bring verses and promises of God to our thoughts and focus on them above any distractions and temptations. Bringing our minds back to those verses and promises again and again can help us stay our thinking on what God says about us and what we can do instead of what the world is saying or doing.
Because of Christ’s accomplishments, our position is that of sons of God. As we are His children, He gave us certain rights and privileges. What we need to do to access them is believe that we have them. So let’s be bold and act like the children of God that we are as we renew our minds. Open the door and claim your rights!
To read more about the legal rights we can enjoy as sons of God, check out The New, Dynamic Church, chapter 5, “Key to Power,” from The Way International Bookstore.