Close your eyes. If God were to stand right in front of you and he said one word to describe who you are to him, what would he choose?

If it is anything other than son or daughter, this message is for you. God created us for sonship and daughterhood, not orphanhood. He created us to be accepted, not rejected.

We all face rejection from time to time, and people respond differently to it. You have some people who seem to be disaffected by others’ opinions. Some are currently dying beneath the weight of what others’ think about them.

But God’s plan for you has always been you in the family.

John 14:18
“I will not leave you as orphans; I am coming to you.”

Why orphan? Of all the things Jesus could have said, why orphan? Sinners? Lost? Broken? Condemned? Separated?

I am convinced that our biggest need wasn’t saving from sin, but, rather, saving from orphanhood. Sin is just a fundamental ignorance of who God, and as a result, who we are.

When we are living in sin, we are unable to see God for who he really is. It is a identity issue. We make it about right and wrong, but if that was the case, then the law should have fixed the sin issue. Do this. Don’t do that. Problem solved.

But sin isn’t really as much a right and wrong issue as it is an identity issue, a love and obedience issue. It is misunderstanding of the father/son or daughter relationship we were born to experience.

So what is the big issue then? Orphanhood. I think this is why Jesus said orphan, not something else. And sin’s ability to distort our view of God the Father so that we embrace orphanhood is one of Satan’s best strategies.

Yall, this is where the orphan spirit and rejection live.

Romans 8:12-17:
“So then, brothers, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh. For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. 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 - The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs - heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.”

If life according to the Spirit is sonship, then what is life lived according to the flesh? Orphanhood.

You see, Satan knew the effects of the father/son relationship.

Ezekiel 28 tells us about Satan before the fall, that he was on the Holy Mountain and that as the covering angel, he was constantly in the presence of the Trinity, specifically God the Father and Jesus the Son.

That meant that from the moment he was created, that he saw, day in and day out, God the Father perfectly loving his Son. He had a front row seat to the most amazing love imaginable, the loving Father loving his loved Son.

It means that Satan knew why Jesus was sinless. Love! This is big because, remember, it is our sin that makes us orphans. So God’s answer was loving you into a father/son or daughter relationship with him

John 14:15, “If you love Me, you will keep My commands.”

Satan knows that love and obedience go hand in hand. Love’s byproduct is obedience, but so many people see obedience as the prerequisite for love.
That is all the orphan knows, “I’m either abandoned or accepted because of what I do.”

That was me. I always thought I could prove my love to God by how well I obeyed his commands. If I succeeded, I was loved, and I proved my love
But if I failed to obey effectively, I felt rejection because I was certain he didn’t want me, a sinner. This translated to people, too. Do well and they love you. Do poorly and they reject you.

But John 14:15 isn’t an equation or formula designed so you can prove devotion or earn acceptance. It is an invitation to something better than not sinning.

What God is offering us through Jesus is not just a solution for sin,
but something better: a family.

But as long as you are operating in an orphan spirit, you’ll never experience family. You will always be in the house, but it never becomes a home

So how does Satan work orphanhood into us? Patchwork Quilt - Distorting the view of the father

From KTOS:
“It should be no surprise to us that Satan is so adamant at destroying our view of the Father. His real goal is separating you from that love between the Father and the Son that he observed in the eternity before you were ever born, before the world was ever created. His how is to create in you the spirit of the orphan, of rejection, of deprecated value, of disobedience and repulsion to authority, to manipulate you, and to deceive you into not trusting God. He wants to convince you that God is hiding something from you and he cannot be trusted, much less deserving of love or obedience. That is his how, but his why is simple: he is desperate to keep you from experiencing the love of your Heavenly Father that he saw first hand in the eternity before time began. So the enemy manipulates circumstances and relationships in our lives to keep us locked in to a counterfactual way of thinking and living through rejection and the orphan spirit. He knows if you see the Father he saw all those years while he covered the throne, then you would experience the inexplicable joy, freedom, satisfaction, the salvation, the family identity that comes with simply being one of God’s sons or daughters. Satan is literally hell-bent on you never having that clarity, and he will stop at nothing to keep that moment from happening in your own life. So what the enemy does is destroy every connection that you could possible have with the Father, starting with your earthly father. He tries to use every moment of your life, every experience, every situation, good or bad. In the bad moments he will tell you God abandoned and rejected you. In the good moments he will tell you that you did it without God. He will use them all to separate you from your Father.”

To be an orphan means to be fatherless, family-less, abandoned. To be rejected means to be dismissed, refused, spurned, not good enough.

So what is God wanting to do about this? God is wanting to get us back to the original design. What’s that?

Luke 3:38 Son of Seth, Son of Adam, Son of God.

Your original design, God’s original intent for your life, was you as a loved son, a loved daughter, and God will not stop this process of restoration until you get back to your original design.

Now we are going to do an activity to help you determine if this is something you need to deal with.

The List

Love Deficits
Everything is performance driven. You avoid God for a few days after sinning, You have intense unforgiveness and animosity towards people, especially leaders in your life who have taken advantage of you. You have either unhealed wounds from and unforgiveness for a father who abandoned you, or one who was disengaged in your life. You have anger at God because he didn’t stop people from hurting you.
Authority Problems
You often feel like people are taking or will take advantage of you. You have a hard time trusting people, especially authority. You love affirmation but despise instruction. To you, instruction says your effort wasn’t good enough.

Self Worth/Identity Issues
You rarely ever felt good enoughYou often feel overlooked.You are cripplingly frustrated about where you are in life.You are super sensitive, interpreting reality in a way where you are the victim. You are very critical of yourself.Your position or title gives you your identity.
Leadership Failures
You are constantly in competition with others around you, You hate delegating because you’ll probably just have to end up doing it yourself anyway. You see your success as relying totally upon you.

Character Issues
You have a desperate drive to be known or be significant. You hold on to hurts from others because it allows you to justify your anger towards them. You easily justify in your own life what you oppose in someone else’s. Everything is a struggle where you never feel like you get ahead.

I don’t know how long you have been alive, but up to this moment, you have had the oppressive power of the enemy working against you.
The mindsets on this list were not things that you woke up and chose.
These were well designed attacks against you and your purpose.

Now in my life, while I didn’t want these mindsets, but I became very good at embracing them, believing them, identifying with them.
So here’s what you have to do:

1. Discover the narrative.
What is the lie satan has been feeding you that has impacted every moment of your life? This is the narrative. For me, good not good enough. That narrative will keep you rejected, living as an orphan, fighting to survive.

Understand literarily:
The narrative is the character’s version of reality, which can differ from actual reality. You might exhibit items on the list from a moment ago, but these things are often not what is really happening, rather they’re what you think is happening based on your narrative

2. Replace the lie with the truth
What is the truth? God’s Word
John 8:32
You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

This ain’t happy thoughts wishful thinking and fairy dust. We aren’t fighting Captain Hook and the Holy Spirit ain’t Tinker Bell. We’re fighting a spirit over here.

What does God say and think about you?
What does it say that God sent his son to die so that you could be a son again?
How could God see you as an orphan when even at your worst, Jesus died for you?

Matthew 10:29-31
Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows.

You are loved in spite of your brokenness.

3. Forgive
The only path to freedom is forgiveness. You have to forgive those who orphaned and rejected you. You have to forgive yourself for believing the lie. My list and prayer. You will never feel like forgiving because forgiving isn’t a feeling it is a choice. You have to chose to let go. Forgiveness is not the act of condoning the bad behavior, but of refusing to allow it to impact your life any longer.

4. Walking it out
You have to replace the spirit of the orphan with the spirit of adoption. Once you deal with a spirit or thought process, it always comes back to test the door knobs. The more you lean into the Holy Spirit the stronger the witness of your sonship gets. It gets easier to recognize the trap.

Why are the orphan spirit and rejection tied together? The orphan spirit uses rejection as a tool to manipulate you so that you will ultimately feel rejected and orphaned by God.

You may feel rejected and abandoned but are not actually being rejected and abandoned. You may feel rejected and abandoned and actually ARE being rejected and abandoned.

NONE of this changes your identity in Christ, your status as a child of God,
or your value in the Kingdom.

At the end of the day, we break the power of the lies we’ve internalized
and we receive the truth about who we are, and whose we are.


I choose today to be free from rejection and an orphan spirit.
I confess I have acted in ungodly ways towards people, especially authorities in my life.
I confess I have placed my hope in people and not in you, God.
I’ve craved their affirmation over yours. I’ve received my identity from them and not you.
As a result, they have failed me as people will, and it has caused me to judge them and even you.
By rejecting these people and authorities in my life, I have rejected you, God.
It put animosity between me and them, and between you and I as well.
No matter how they acted, I was the one who allowed rejection and the orphan spirit to take root.
I confess that as sin.
I confess I have allowed rejection and the orphan spirit to guide my current thoughts and actions,
and to highjack my future.
I have carried a chip on my shoulder and have resorted to anger, lying, manipulation, rejection, fear, anxiety, and aggression when challenged.
I confess these as sin.
I have responded completely out of my hurt. I confess this as sin.
I want to be free from these things, so I forgive all of these who have hurt me, be it their intention or not, be it people whose hurts I remember or not.
I ask for your forgiveness Father, and as you forgive me, I also forgive myself.
I fall out of agreement with the lies I’ve believed, Lies that have made me feel rejected and orphaned.
I renounce rejection and an orphan spirit, and receive the spirit of adoption in Jesus Name, amen.