Many Christians would be familiar with the passage in Paul's epistle to the Romans, where he wrote to the church, "For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!”" (Romans 8:15, ESV)
One of the best illustrations of the meaning of the primal cry of "Abba! Father!" I have heard to-date comes from a message preached by Russell Moore, "Primal Scream Theology: The Call and Response of the Abba Cry", originally preached on Sunday, 3 May 2009, at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky, where Moore recounts part the story of the adoption of his two sons from a Russian orphanage:
[The] creepiest sound I ever heard in my life was nothing at all.
My wife Maria and I were walking into a Russian orphanage on the first of two trips to the former Soviet Union to meet two boys to whom we had been directed to adopt as our sons.
We'd never seen them; we didn't know all that much about them, but when we walked into the doors of that orphanage, the thing that struck us right away was not the stench, although it was overpowering; I had to resist the urge to walk outside and vomit. It wasn't the squalor of the walls cracking apart and the dilapidated building although that was awful.
The thing that struck me right away was the silence.
I said to Maria, "Will you just listen for a minute?"
The place is completely still and quiet and there are babies everywhere. As you walked up and down the halls of that orphanage, room after room after room of toddlers and infants, but there was not a cry. It was almost like the Christmas carol that we sing, "all is calm, all is bright", no crying any of them made.
And it slowly dawned on me that what had happened was that you have an institution full of babies without mothers, without fathers, who are learning that when they cry, no one is going to respond. And so a baby learns if he is hungry or distressed or alarmed, that when he cries out, when she calls out, if that happens enough, they will stop crying.
And so all that you heard in this orphanage is the sound of cribs rocking and hitting against the walls as infants comforted themselves in cradles.
And every day, for a week, my wife and I would walk into a room where we found these two little Russian boys. And every day we would play with them and read with them and tell them - even though they couldn't understand us - that we would come to get them and they would be our children soon. And every day we would leave, and we would leave to silence.
Until the last day of that trip.
Maria and I were told, "It's time for you to go, you're going to have to leave these boys behind, and you're going to have to go back to the United States and you'll have to wait for all the paperwork to be done, and you're going to have to leave now."
We said, "Can we have five more minutes with these boys?"
They said, "You can have five more minutes."
And we hugged on them and we kissed them, and I said, "We will not leave you as orphans. We will come to you." And we walked out of the door.
And as soon as we walked out of the door, one of those little one-year-old boys - little Maxim, whose name now is Benjamin - fell face-first into that crib filled with excrement and screamed.
It was the most beautiful sound I have ever heard.
Not because of his agony, not because of his sense of abandonment, but because in that scream he recognised us as his parents. He knew that we would hear.
That is exactly what the Apostle Paul says is happening in the life of the believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, when through the Holy Spirit you cry out "Abba! Father!"
This is our primal cry to God when we cry out "Abba! Father!" It is a cry with the knowledge that we have a God who will hear us. As the Psalmist writes, speaking from God's perspective, "He will call upon me, and I will answer him; I will be with him in trouble, I will deliver him and honour him." (Psalm 91:15)
This is the spirit of adoption, the spirit of sonship, that we receive through God's beloved Son, Jesus Christ.
