“In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will…”
– Ephesians 1:4-6
Adoption is at the Core of the Message
Jesus is the one true king and he has provided us with a free way to be forgiven and made right with God. All we need to do is repent of our sinful ways and start following Christ and he will forgive our sins and give us a new life that is in him. Not only this, but we will spend an eternity united with Christ in his new kingdom which will culminate with the recreation and bringing together of heaven and earth. We will spend an eternity as new creatures in God’s new creation living in the way that he always intended.
This is the gospel message. However, we must not stop there; this message is not yet complete. We cannot forget that all throughout the New Testament scriptures, the imagery that is used to describe our salvation is that of a loving Father adopting us into his family (Romans 8:15, Romans 9:4, Galatians 4:5, Ephesians 1:5, John 1:12, 1 John 3:1, etc.). We will not just spend eternity with God in his new creation, but we will also be adopted into the family of God as sons and daughters of God himself.
An Image of the Gospel
Our Story
My wife and I have four daughters – three biological and one adopted. When you have biological children, you do not really have a choice in your obligation towards them – they are born into your family and you love and care for them. My love for my kids comes with a responsibility to raise and take care of them in a different way than I would for somebody else’s kids. The scripture does, in fact, affirm that we have a real obligation to care for our family and household (1 Timothy 5:8), but it also affirms that we have responsibility to take care of orphans (1 James 1:27, Deuteronomy 26:12). This is not an optional thing; we should all be giving of our resources, time, and energy to help feed, care for, mentor, and advocate for orphans and the fatherless.
Adoption is the most personal and effective way to care for orphans. When a child is adopted, they are brought into a new family and have an equal status as a child within that family. They take on the name of the family and are given legal status as an heir within their new family.
The process that parents must go through to be placed with a child is a long and difficult one. In most countries today, potential adoptive parents need to apply to adopt through an agency, submit a lot of documents, pay fees, provide references, give interviews, pass a background check, and then either wait to be matched with a child or sort through the available children and pick one. In our case, we adopted a child from India, and after we were cleared by the government for adoption, we got access to a database with thousands of kids that we could read about and select from.
After we had access to the database of kids, we chose our daughter in about a week, but the whole process took about 14 months from the time of our initial application. Do you know what she had to do during those 14 months? Absolutely nothing. We had to do all of the work, pay the fees, do the interviews, provide the documents, select our daughter and then go and get her. We chose to do all of this and we chose to adopt her. There is something truly special about our relationship with her because we chose it. We didn’t have to do it, but we did.
God’s Gracious Choice
This adoption process is a vivid picture of the gospel in many ways. God chose to adopt us into his family. He left his comfortable home to come close to us, he did all of the work, he paid the full price that was required for our redemption, and he chose to bring us into his family. He gave us his name and made us children and heirs with Christ (Romans 8:16-17). Do you know what we had to do while he was doing this? Absolutely nothing. He chose to bring us into his family before we were even born. It was all done by God and by the grace of God apart from anything that we did or could do. We are not just incidentally saved. Our salvation is not the result of anything that we have done. Rather, we are saved from the path of destruction that we were on and adopted into the family of God because he himself chose us. All we had to do to earn this was precisely nothing!
That is why adoption is such a strong picture of the gospel, because it helps us to remember that it is all about what God has done to bring us into his family and not about who we are or what we can contribute. God has done it all; we can add nothing – to God alone be the glory!
For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.
– John 15:16
