This morning we finalized the adoption of our third and (Lord willing) last child. It’s been a long, tortuous process, so we’re especially stoked that it’s finally done.
While it’s been painful for us to endure the ups and downs of the legal system, I can understand why they set up so many hoops for us to jump through. They want to make sure that once the adoption is finalized, it’s actually final. They want to exclude every possibility that the adoption could ever be challenged and reversed. They want to make sure that our new son will always remain ours.
And that gives me a unique mental image of the adoption process we go through with God. It’s a theme you’ll find throughout the New Testament:
- “When the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons (Galatians 4).
- “He chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will” (Ephesians 1).
And my favorite…
- “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!’ The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God (Rom 8).
There are three things you learn about God’s adoption from those verses: it’s legal, it’s eternal, and it’s relational.
There’s a legal transaction that takes place when you are redeemed by Christ to be adopted as a son of God. Once it’s done there’s nothing that can undo it, since you were chosen by God before the foundation of the world. And your status as God’s adopted kid gives you the privilege of calling him “Abba” (the Hebrew word for “Daddy”) and relating to him like you’re one of his own.
All three of those things happened today in our family on a much smaller scale. And so tonight at bedtime, as I pray over a kid who was abandoned on a beach when God intervened to bring him into our family, I’ll be even more amazed by the incredible reality of my own undeserved adoption into God’s family.