Dr. Duffy Robbins at Ocean City Tabernacle

Slavery or Adoption

Ocean City Tabernacle
Where Jesus Christ Is Central
Summer Series Finale • Service Recap & Review

Service Details

• Speaker: Dr. Duffy Robbins
• Venue: Ocean City Tabernacle — 550 Wesley Ave, Ocean City, NJ 08226
• Date: Sunday, September 6, 2026 — 8:30 AM Traditional Service • Summer Series Finale
• Message Title: “Slavery or Adoption”
• Scripture: Romans 8:14–17
• SEO Keywords: Dr. Duffy Robbins · Ocean City Tabernacle · Ocean City NJ · Romans 8 · slavery or adoption · Abba Father · spirit of adoption · Grove City College · Eastern University · 2026 summer speaker series finale · Ocean City Tabernacle YouTube · Dogs with Duffy

The Final Sunday of an Extraordinary Summer

Every summer has to end. But the Ocean City Tabernacle has a way of ending well.

Dr. Duffy Robbins — Professor of Christian Ministries at Grove City College, veteran of more than 40 years in youth ministry, author, speaker, and the man whose name has been on the Tabernacle’s lips all summer long — closed the 2026 Summer Speaker Series on September 6th with a message from Romans 8:14-17 entitled “Slavery or Adoption.”

He arrived with a raspy voice from fighting allergies — which he joked made him sound like he’d been out until 2 AM smoking and drinking (he had actually been in around 2 AM, he admitted). He brought a toothbrush story, a hide-and-seek story, and a story about a pin in a couch cushion. And he brought Romans 8. It was more than enough.

The full service is on the Ocean City Tabernacle YouTube channel. Watch it and share it with someone who has been working really hard at something God simply wants to give them.

Who Is Dr. Duffy Robbins?

Dr. Duffy Robbins spent 27 years as a professor and chair of the Youth Ministry Department at Eastern University before moving to Grove City College in Pennsylvania, where he now serves as Professor of Christian Ministries. He is the author of more than a dozen books on youth ministry, adolescent faith, and discipleship, and has spoken on every continent. Tom Sherf introduced him as someone with a rare gift for making Scripture come alive — delivered with warmth, quick humor, and the kind of genuine engagement that makes a room lean in.

He is also, by this point, simply family at the Tabernacle. The “Dogs with Duffy” picnic that closes every summer is named for him. He has been coming for nine summers in a row. When he asked who had perfect attendance at the hymn sing, he promised them certificates from the Sunday school superintendent — and got a room full of knowing laughs from people who remember when that was actually a thing.

The Electric Toothbrush — and the Power You Didn’t Know You Had

Duffy Robbins has a quirk: he brushes his teeth in the shower to get all his hygiene done at once. He also has a game he plays with his wife Maggie, involving throwing his toothbrush over the shower door in a hook shot that lands on the sink in front of her. “This is pure joy for both of us,” he said with a completely straight face.

On one particular night, he had just bought a new toothbrush. The hook shot was picture-perfect. It sailed over the door, over Maggie’s head, landed in the sink — and immediately began buzzing.

“It had a built-in battery apparently. I had really not looked closely enough to see it was electric. So all weekend I’d been brushing my teeth with this electric toothbrush, moving my hand really hard, trying to reach all the tough spots, never realizing that this thing actually had power.”

“And that’s kind of a crazy story,” he said, “but I mention it this morning because this is precisely the mistake a lot of us make as Christians. We try to practice all kinds of spiritual hygiene — to be really religious and to work really hard to clean up our lives and get just the perfect spiritual smile — without realizing that God has given us power.”

Acts 1:8. “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you.” And his central proposition for the morning followed: “A lot of us underexperience God’s power in us because we don’t fully understand God’s presence with us.”

“A lot of us underexperience God’s power in us because we don’t fully understand God’s presence with us. We’ve been working so hard for what God so much wants to give.”

The Magic Eye — and What the Holy Spirit Does to Your Vision

Before diving into Romans 8, Duffy took a detour through the 1990s — specifically, the Magic Eye optical illusion posters that seemed to be in every beach store on every boardwalk in America. Auto-stereograms, he noted, for those who like the technical term.

“You’re supposed to kind of stare at this Magic Eye artwork until you see something. And if you look at it right, you kind of start to see this three-dimensional depth to the picture and you begin to make sense of all the random colors and shapes because now you’re seeing more depth and clearer images.” He admitted this one took him three minutes before he finally saw it was a unicorn walking into a Walmart.

“One thing everybody seems to agree on is that once you see the image, you can’t quite unsee it. There’s a shift in your perspective. You see it differently.”

“The ministry of the Holy Spirit in the life of a believer is very much like that. As the Holy Spirit works in our lives, this God who maybe at one time seemed hard to see, or distant, now becomes more visible, more real, more accessible. And that begins to change the way we see everything else. It completely shifts our perspective.”

“Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. The Holy Spirit works in our lives the same way — and once you begin to see who God really is, it changes the way you see everything else.”

Affirmation One: The Holy Spirit Leads Us Into God’s Family

Romans 8:14: “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.” Before unpacking what that means, Duffy told the story of Danny Bolo.

Danny was a full-blooded Cherokee Indian who worked on Duffy’s summer camp staff. “His neck was bigger than my thigh. Just an unbelievable specimen of a dude.” When the camp director needed kids herded back up the beach, two counselors started trekking down the sand. Danny never moved. He simply stood up from his beach chair and bellowed: “Everybody back up the beach.” And adults who weren’t even with the group started picking up beach furniture and moving.

“That’s a perfect example of what industrial psychologists call coercive power. It is an authority based on fear — the authority the big have over the little, the strong have over the weak.”

“What makes this passage so stunning is that the God of the universe — who has all the power and might of the Lord of glory — instead of treating us like slaves, instead of just barking out orders and rebukes and condemnation, he invites us to come close to him as his children.”

He walked the room through what adoption meant in first-century Roman culture. An adopted son was deliberately chosen to perpetuate the father’s name and inherit his entire estate. No inferior status. Some historians suggest even more affection, because he was chosen. “In a world that consistently tells us we’re not tall enough or pretty enough or smart enough or rich enough or religious enough or successful enough — Romans 8:14 says you were chosen by the Father. As the old preachers put it: he sought us and caught us and bought us and taught us.”

“We’re not just on his team. We are in his family.”

“In a world that consistently tells us we are not enough, Romans 8:14 says you were chosen by the Father. All of us are children of God by creation. But it is something entirely different to be God’s adopted child by recreation — by new creation.”

Affirmation Two: The Holy Spirit Releases Us Into God’s Freedom

Romans 8:15: “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!’”

Duffy told the story of hide-and-seek with his daughters Erin and Katie. He always hid in the basement — dark, damp, and home to small animals, which he had helpfully disclosed to his daughters as a deterrent. It never worked. He could hear the basement door squeak open, the little voices at the top of the stairs plotting strategy. Erin’s strategy: “Katie, you go first.”

When they finally crept toward the storage chest where they thought he was hiding, there was a classic exchange: “He’s in there.” “He’s not in there.” “He is in there.” “He won’t fit in there.” Duffy noted that this last comment, from daughter Erin, has affected Santa’s delivery schedule ever since.

He sprang from behind the workbench, grabbed two small ankles in the dark, and screamed. “The next few moments are a study in raw terror.” And then the laughter, the rolling on the floor, the tickling.

The point: all of us are, at some level, walking in darkness hoping to find light but terrified to be found and exposed. That has been the default posture of humanity since the garden.

“But there’s such freedom in Paul’s words in verse 15. By the power of the Holy Spirit we can know a confidence in our relationship with God. We no longer serve him in fear like slaves but approach him in confidence like children.”

He paused on the word Abba. Using familiar language for God was completely unheard of in Jewish culture. “It would be like calling your father-in-law ‘dude.’” Abba was the tenderest, most intimate term for father — what a small child calls a daddy. It is the word Jesus used in the Garden of Gethsemane. He noted that across languages, a child’s name for their father is always something pronounceable without teeth, always two identical syllables. He asked his daughter what his first grandchild should call him. “I said: how about Duffy? And it totally got us off on the wrong foot. She now calls me dude.”

“In a world where it feels like we always have to keep our guard, always have to hedge our bets, live our lives in self-imposed slavery — verse 15 says the Holy Spirit gives us full permission to call out to God not as slave to master, but as child to Abba. Our Abba Father invites us to stop hiding and allow ourselves to be fully found. Because we’re no longer slaves.”

“Our Abba Father invites us to stop hiding and allow ourselves to be fully found. When we come to God, we can come as we are — joyful, hurt, confused, defeated — without feeling like we need to emotionally stand at attention. We are no longer slaves.”

Affirmation Three: The Holy Spirit Returns Us to God’s Fullness

Romans 8:16-17: “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.”

When Duffy was about nine years old, he was in a YMCA program called Indian Guides — designed to help fathers and sons spend time together. One week, he and his dad were doing a craft in the den. Dad got up to make popcorn and bring back Cokes. And little nine-year-old Duffy decided to make things better.

“I’m going to play a little trick on my dad.” He took a pin from the craft project and placed it point-up in his father’s cushion. “Because you remember when you’re a little kid and you see cartoons and somebody sits on something sharp, they fly up about five feet in the air and you’re going: that’s funny.”

Dad came back with Cokes in both hands and sat down. Full weight.

“As soon as I saw the expression on his face, I just knew. What a huge mistake.” Duffy started crying. Started apologizing. “I’ll never forget my dad. He didn’t even really give me a chance to get out any words. He came over and he hugged me and he said, ‘You know what, son? I forgive you. I forgive you. I know you love me. I’m going to be all right.’”

“That incident, that hug, totally defined my fellowship with my father. Because I think for the first time I just realized how much my dad loved me.”

“Men and women, that’s probably as close as I can get to explaining what Paul means in verse 16 when he says the Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God. Part of the Spirit’s work in our lives is to ratify in the heart what we already know in the head.”

The Holy Spirit, he said, is the parakletos — the one called to our side. Like a father watching a baby learn to walk, who doesn’t get upset when they fall but kneels down, picks them up, encourages them. “Nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” That is the promise of adoption. No matter what, the Holy Spirit returns us to God’s fullness.

He acknowledged the suffering clause in verse 17 — and addressed it with the same honesty he had brought to everything else. It is real. Paul intends it. Blessing and suffering are woven together throughout the entire Bible. “I’d go so far as to say if you aren’t facing some kind of suffering at some point, that should cause you concern. It’s very much like athletes who say of a coach: it was hard on me, but I knew it was because he cared, because he wanted more for me.”

“That hug totally defined my fellowship with my father. Because for the first time I realized how much my dad loved me. And that’s what Paul means in verse 16 — the Spirit’s work is to ratify in the heart what we already know in the head.”

It’s Almost Like the Magic Eye Comes Into Focus

Duffy closed by circling back to hide-and-seek. The moment after the scream, after the brief chaos and terror and squealing — there was always a moment of recognition.

“Erin looks at Katie. Katie looks at me. Erin looks at me. I look at Erin and Katie. And all of a sudden we’re looking at each other. And the next thing you know — attack instead. They dive at my legs and we’re rolling around the floor and we’re laughing and tickling each other, because in that moment they go: we don’t have to be afraid of this guy. He’s our dad.”

“It’s almost like the magic eye comes into focus. This is our Father.”

His closing prayer said everything: “Lord, maybe we’ve walked with you for years and never realized this toothbrush has power. We’ve been working so hard for what you so much want to give. Lord, I pray today you would help us to open our hearts to this privilege that has been bought for us through the blood of Jesus on his cross.”

“It’s almost like the magic eye comes into focus. We don’t have to be afraid. He’s our dad. He’s our Father. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.”

A Closing Word — Dogs, Donuts, and a Summer Worth Remembering

Gena Willard, President of the OCT Board of Trustees, closed the service with a word that captured the whole summer: “Wow, what a summer.” She thanked the faithful staff, ushers and greeters, board members, and especially Tom Sherf, whose energy and love for the Tabernacle, she said, is “truly contagious.” She announced that the bell tower — part of the Tabernacle’s nearly 150-year story — is being beautifully restored and will be visible and audible when the congregation returns next summer.

Tom closed with the summer’s signature benediction: “Go forth. Proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ. Nurture faith in the next generation. Serve your family, church, and community.” And then: donuts, fellowship, and the “Dogs with Duffy” picnic on the grounds.

Tom also teased that next summer’s speaker series is nearly fully booked — names coming soon. And the fall season at the Tabernacle is already full: a block party, a Christmas concert with Point of Grace and Jason Gray, the Ark Preschool and Sun Club Christmas performances, and more.

The 2026 Summer Speaker Series at the Ocean City Tabernacle ran from Memorial Day through Labor Day weekend and featured messages from some of the most compelling voices in American Christianity — generals and surgeons, theologians and musicians, presidents and pastors, survivors and scholars. Every one of them carried the same thread: the Gospel of Jesus Christ, proclaimed without apology, offered without condition, sufficient for every human story.

And in the end, Duffy Robbins closed it the way only Duffy Robbins can — with a toothbrush, two little girls in the dark, and Romans 8. It was a summer worth remembering. Every message is on the Ocean City Tabernacle YouTube channel. Subscribe so you never miss a Sunday.

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Watch Dr. Duffy Robbins: “Slavery or Adoption”

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