Listening to John Piper’s message on adoption encouraged me. I still feel like my heart is a long way from embracing adoption, but I have more faith that God will move my heart into the right place if adoption is how he wants us to build our family. As Piper outlined eight ways that our adoption of children reflects God’s adoption of us through salvation, I felt grateful afresh for the gospel. God paid a great cost to choose me, to take me out of the worst circumstances – my sin – so that I could call him “Daddy” and become an heir with Christ. Through this message, I recognized the significance and purpose of the way God likens his act of salvation to adoption. He could have described salvation in terms of new birth alone, but he purposefully inspired the writers of his Word to also use the metaphor of adoption. It uplifted me to see the value of adoption in God’s eyes. Piper’s elaboration on Eph. 1:4-6 brought tears to my eyes:
“Now I know it is sweet and uniquely precious to have children by birth, and that if you can’t, you look sometimes to adoption, so then it can feel like this is Plan B. God did not save you that way. He didn’t say, ‘Now, Plan A is to have lots of kids this way. But they blew that in the garden. So, Plan B, I’ll have to save them from slavery by adoption.’ That’s exactly not what happened. … His Plan A was, ‘I will save them at the cost of my Son that they might understand how much I love them.’ Which means, for our own experience, that we should think in terms of two uniquely precious realities. One is having children by birth. It’s unique; nothing is like it. And having children by adoption is unique; nothing is like it. You don’t need to weigh these off against each other as though one is better or worse. There are unique things that are precious and beautiful about [each]. God uses both terminology to describe how we become his children. We can think of both. And if we are moving toward adoption as our first choice or our second choice, they don’t need to be ranked like one is better or one is worse than the other. God is able to give you the grace to embrace adoption as equal to Plan A. Even if it wasn’t sequentially Plan A, it can now rank as a Plan A, equal to Plan A.”
Adoption certainly isn’t Plan A, sequentially, for us. But seeing God’s intent from the beginning of time to adopt me as his child, that gives me an ounce more faith that I might come to see adoption as a blessed plan for us.
2 comments:
Wow- I will go check out the message. I really like John Piper, actually I have a link to his article about William Wilberforce on my blog this week.
Blessings,
Obviously I'm reading some of your older posts, but had to comment here. I needed to read this. Reading this and your other feelings about adoption helped open up a new way of thinking for me. Adoption may be in my future as well. I don't want it to be a Plan B, but another, different Plan A that is just as welcomed and anticipated.
Again, thanks for writing from your heart.
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