For national adoption month I thought I would put up a paper I recently wrote on adoption by grace.

*********************************************
On a rainy Seattle morning in March 1969, a husband and wife park their car in front of a nondescript brick home which resembles a small duplex located on Queen Anne Hill. They move quickly and nervously as they approach the front door and find themselves fidgeting with their coats and hurriedly checking their hair to ensure they’re presentable. The firm knock on the door from the husband is answered by a woman who warmly welcomes them inside to escape the rain. They enter the home and sense an excitement about the next few moments. They have been looking forward to this day and have planned for its arrival for some time. They could hear babies in the background, some crying, some cooing, some sleeping, but all without a clue as to what is taking place. After several minutes another woman, smiling, steps into the living room which is fashioned into a waiting area with a small bundle of life wrapped in a blue blanket and hands a three month old, chubby, baby boy to the wife who begins to examine the baby as if she’s not sure if it’s real. She softly speaks to the baby and gently bounces it in her arms. She is no stranger to holding a baby and her perfect position shows it. Eventually the husband becomes impatient and wants to see the boy. He picks the boy up with his strong hands and holds him up to see him. The baby smiles from ear to ear as he tries to grab the man’s beard. Overcome with joy, the father’s eyes begin to well up with tears as he proudly proclaims, “this is my boy.”

I’ve heard this story more times than I can count over the last 38 years of my life. This story is about me. I was the fat, or as my mother called me, “husky” baby boy. The place they visited was an orphanage that received babies who were either abandoned or whose mothers had decided that they would not be able to care for their baby. Oddly enough, even before becoming a Christian, what warmed my heart more than anything in this story was not that it was a story about my life, but a story about a mother and father, under no compulsion, who for months went through the painful process of paperwork and background checks hoping that one day they would get the call to drive 60 miles to Seattle so that they could open their hearts, arms, and home to a child that did not deserve or merit their love. Now, I wouldn’t have put it into those words as a young man but the feeling was definitely there. I felt special, chosen, loved and cared for perhaps in ways that my sisters, who were naturally born to my mother, did not. It seemed like a special kind of love since it wasn’t natural or expected. I guess you could say it felt supernatural. I remember at 7 when my sisters told me I was adopted as a way of mocking me. Instead of becoming upset I was curious as to what it meant and so I went to my mother to ask if it was true. She said simply “yes, but we had to keep your sisters, you were special since we chose you!” It was funny, but true. She said it with a grin and a whisper as if it was our little secret. From that day on, whenever my sisters would make fun of me (as older sisters like to do), I would coolly respond by telling them, “Yeah, I’m adopted, but that makes me special and you ordinary. Mom and Dad had to keep whatever came out when you were born, but they got to choose me.” They soon came to realize that their mockery came back to bite them and slowly their comments faded away.

Growing up in a home that was not religious, at least not in any formal way, I didn’t have the benefit of a biblical worldview or even a simple understanding of the Christian story. However, the feeling I remember most in my formative years were perhaps the deepest and most profound Gospel-truths I have come to cherish: I’m chosen, adopted, loved and cherished, all by grace and nothing of my own merit or resources could win such scandalous favor. In spite of having non-believing parents, God’s providential hand was at work to bring me to a place where these deep personal experiences which made up my personal story, collided and converged with the greater story of God’s redemptive plan for my and this world’s history. As a new believer, I came to understand that my story only made sense if it was rooted in His story. His story is a that of Great Father, who under no compulsion, purposes in His heart to set His love upon the countless orphans who are born without any resources, any greatness to commend themselves, and yet He takes us into His strong hands, lifts us up for all of the created world to see and to hear the same words which He proclaimed to His only begotten, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” (Matt. 3:17). This incredible truth that the Father is as pleased with me as He is with His Son Jesus, is what swells my heart with a joy that chases away my past and current failures. This is why John Owen could ask,

If the love of a father will not make a child delight in him, what will?

Earlier in this paragraph, Owen gives us a great discovery of joy that anchors all other joys and dispels our sorrows:

Every other discovery of God, without this, will but make the soul fly from him; but if the heart be once much taken up with this the eminency of the Father’s love, it cannot choose but be overpowered, conquered, and endeared unto him.

The truth of our new identity as adopted children of God was the highlight of my visit last month as I attended the summer residency class for the Spiritual and Ministry Formation course under the teaching and encouragement of Dr. Douglass. I was stunned at the level of intensity with which Dr. Douglass ensured this truth was not simply to be understood theologically as intellectual doctrine alone, but felt emotionally and lived out experientially. As I sat in class, there were several moments when I felt I would burst into tears, not because I was convicted by some particular sin, though those moments occurred, but rather I was overwhelmed by an apprehension of the deep, deep, love which my Father has for me. I remember mentioning to Dr. Douglass that I was convicted that in the past I would bring myself under the Law to drive myself to repentance. Though this works for me as a quick and powerfully convicting truth, I realized that in some way I had cheapened the Law to be nothing more than a “tool” to bring me to repentance rather than the stipulations by which God desires our relationship to be in conformity with His character as I’m empowered by the confidence that His Son has perfectly kept the Law on my behalf not only to save me, but to bring me to His Father as an adopted son. In other words, the Law had become something distant from God rather than flowing from His very nature and person. When I realized my sins of commission and omission were far deeper than breaking what had become an abstract Law and were primarily rooted in a lack of believing and cherishing God’s profound love for me as my Father, it was almost too much for me to bear. I believe for the first time in my Christian walk I experientially understood what it meant for God’s kindness to lead me to repentance.

I learned that this requires a new way of seeing God. A way that does not come natural to me nor other Christians who have lived so long striving to live up to standards set upon us by our family, friends, coaches, bosses, spouses, and children. When we relate to God we often do so with a boss/employee theology. We subconsciously feel that God is never really pleased with us, and if we’re honest, we may even admit that because of this feeling of perpetual failure we’re never really pleased with Him. Our understanding of how He sees us has everything to do with how we see and relate to Him. It is a difficult task to lead a non-believer to understand they are sinners who have a native corruption and are painfully beset by their affliction. However, I believe it is even more difficult to lead believing children of God to understand that though we were sinners deserving God’s disfavor and wrath, we are no longer to remain paralyzed in morbid introspection as we meditate only upon our failures. John Owen warns Christian’s who tend to look at the Father without an awareness of His fatherly love and approval in Christ,

‘with…anxious, doubtful thoughts…What fears, what questionings are there, of his good-will and kindness! At the best, many think there is no sweetness at all in him towards us…’

It is a terrible trap of Satan to truncate the Gospel and twist it into a half-truth which becomes a whole-lie. How often I have willingly taken the bait and spent the next several days wallowing in self pity as I was sure the Father could never love such a wretch like me. There is a danger in self-loathing. It isn’t that we have no reason to loath our sins, it’s that we have no reason to loath ourselves since we are no longer bastard children, but now we are children of God! As a new creature, I am to remind Satan and myself that what I was has died and what I am is alive and hidden in Christ.

Lately, I have found that when Satan comes to remind me of my past or current failures, I am more inclined to remind him of his future state. As I continue to unpack who I am in Christ as God’s child, I’m finding confidence and humility coming together in ways that in the past seemed opposed to one another in my life. I’m learning a confidence in my new status as a beloved child and thus co-inheritor of the Kingdom of God, yet I’m learning humility of character since I’m beginning to believe more intensely that it is only by grace that I have this new status. Previously I tended to boast in my spiritual performance or despair over my failures. You would think that an adopted child would more readily grasp the concept of unmerited favor and steer clear of trying to earn favor. The problem is not in the truth of being adopted by grace, but in how I’ve been trained to live in this world which teaches us that you’re to prove your worth and not allow room for failure. That may be the result of growing up in a small town, but it was in everything I did. So to find courage and humility at work simultaneously has given me a new sense of who I am in Him and how He is at work in me for His glory and my joy.

This profound doctrine has shaped my view of theology as I have discovered the vital gem of applied theology. For too long I have separated theology into compartments. This might be good pedagogically, but practically it has proven to be dangerous and fairly ineffective in my spiritual life. On the one hand, it is easier for me to deal with theological abstractions since I can day-dream on God’s dime. On the other hand, I have found that when my theology is not taken off of the hayloft and brought down to every day life, it can lead me to a lack of true spiritual power and sense of a dynamic vitality. What I have discovered is that if we allow all our theology to be driven by our union in Christ and our status and identity as children of God, we will be better able to process difficult theological truths since we’re learning them as children and not as arrogant classmates of Jesus. This doesn’t excuse us from going deeper in our theology, on the contrary, it actually empowers our quest to learn more of God since we want to know more of our Father who loves us instead of viewing him as our teacher who sits with folded arms waiting to scold us for our intellectual missteps. And though we live in a day when a large majority of ministers attempt to answer every spiritual problem by quoting John 3:16, Sinclair Ferguson reminds us that chanting ‘God loves you!’ might work for bumper stickers and buttons, but they often fail to produce the depth of emotion they are intended to incite if they are not rooted in God’s gracious adoption of His children and our union in Christ,

They cannot give a deep inward persuasion that God does love us, and a knowledge of how that love is manifested to us in calling us his children. By contrast the knowledge of our adoption does something theologically, spiritually, and psychologically for us which all the lapel buttons in the world can never achieve!

I read this quote as an encouragement to develop our theology and it gives me great hope for my theological future. To know that being simple doesn’t mean I’m to be simplistic is a blessing and frees me from the performance trap. The simple truth of my status in Christ is never to be perceived as simplistic. This causes me to consider my motives for wanting to learn more and more theology. My interest to dive deeper in my theological studies should ultimately be a desire to learn more of my Father, through His Son, as I’m illumined by the Spirit to discover more of who I am today in Jesus. This essentially means that my days are not to be spent moving past the beginning essentials of the Christian faith, e.g. the Gospel, rather I’m to do my theology as a daily explication of the Gospel in all of its beauty and splendor as each facet becomes clearer through my studies. As I move into a different stage of my pastoral ministry, this clarification from Dr. Douglass and the books we were assigned to read couldn’t have come at a better time.

I’m thankful for all that I’ve learned from this course and pray that I don’t soon forget the power of God’s declaring me as His own. So many times I wondered why my parents sought me out and gave me their name. Unlike my parents, my Father in heaven is perfect. Unlike my parents, it didn’t simply cost Him time, gas, and paperwork, but the life of His only beloved Son. Unlike my parents, He sacrificed His true Son so that He could make me His adopted son. Like the Apostle John, the only right response when considering the profundity of this theology is a doxology leading to praxis,

See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure. 1 John 3:1-3

Lord, let all my days be lived in response to this truth. Amen.