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THE PERFECT ADOPTION #1

THE PARENT WHO KEPT HER SALES RECEIPT

It's one of the most generous, kind, wonderful things in the world: ADOPTION. Receiving the loving and legal protection of a new Dad. The flip side is devastating: UN-adoption. Does that ever happen? Maybe you've seen it on The Practice - but does God ever send a sinner back to the orphanage?

It was one of the most wrenching story lines we've ever seen — and thankfully, a good share of what you see on NBC and the other networks is fabricated out of a writer's imagination. But on a now-defunct lawyer-type program (it might have been L.A. Law, way back when) a mother and father had an adoption go awry on them. They had received a small boy from an agency . . . and now, several years later, it just wasn't working out. The child had developed a number of money-draining diseases. There had been some pre-existing medical problems the parents hadn't been warned about. He was dysfunctional and ill-behaved, prone to tantrums. And this frustrated mom and dad were honestly wondering if there is such a thing as a "Truth in Disclosure Law" when it comes to adopting a kid.

The bottom line? They wanted to turn the boy back in. No, they hadn't saved their sales receipt, and they didn't want a refund, but they just wanted out. They couldn't hack it anymore. And there was an agonizing scene at the lawyer's office, or the agency, or wherever, as these parents tried to extricate themselves. The child was crying: "Mommy! Daddy! Please! I'll be good! I'll try harder!" And the stricken parents, unable to face it, just fled to the parking lot and drove away. They couldn't take it; they didn't want little Billy Johnson to be a Johnson any longer.

Well, friend, I'm thankful that particular story was an NBC concoction and not reality. But the truth is that many, many adoptions are later rescinded. Desperate mothers just leave a baby at the hospital and drive away fast. In the world of foster parenting, a couple that once expressed a desire to adopt and make it permanent often goes back on their choice. And of course, we also have this dilemma in reverse, where a childless couple really believes they're going to get a baby or small child. They pick him or her up, they go home, they spend five thousand dollars fixing up a nursery, they bond with the new family member. And then, sometimes months later, the birth mother has a change of heart and the adoption is cancelled.

The Bible is filled with adoption language and adoption metaphors, and we want to spend some time these next few weeks exploring what it all means. For instance, we find in the Gospel of John, chapter one, this promise from heaven's adoption agency:

"To all who received Him [Jesus], to those who believed in His name, He gave the right to BECOME children of God."

The book of Galatians paints the same picture of being pulled out of an orphanage:

"You are grown-up sons and daughters of God through your faith-union with the Lord Jesus Christ. . . . Now if you belong to Christ, then you're a descendant of Abraham and you're entitled to everything that God promised him."

But now the question comes: is adoption by God better and more secure than that wrenching story line in L. A. Law, where the papers were shredded and the kid sent back to be a ward of the state? Can the follower of Christ be adopted — all lined up to inherit heaven's riches — and then UN-adopted, and then adopted, and UN-adopted, in a despairing cycle of brief hope followed by doubt? Many, many believers live their religious lives in exactly that way. The bus with the logo on the side, ready to haul them back to the orphanage, is always parked just outside their foster home, always within view. You better watch out, you better not cry, you better not pout, I'm tellin' you why . . .

There's an incredible book — which has been around since 1973 — written by the wonderful evangelical teacher, Dr. J. I. Packer. It's entitled Knowing God, and if you haven't read it, this is a volume well worth ten times the purchase price. We were interested to notice that Pastor Bill Hybels, writing a little testimonial on the back cover, confessed:

"I need a new edition of Knowing God. I've worn my original copy out!"

And Billy Graham adds to the words of praise:

"A hundred years from now only a handful of books written today will still be widely read and accepted as Christian classics. Dr. James I. Packer's Knowing God may well prove to be one of them. A gifted theologian and writer, Dr. Packer has the rare ability to deal with profound and basic spiritual truths in a practical and highly readable way. This book will help every reader grasp in a fuller way one of the Bible's great truths: that we can know God personally, because God wants us to know Him."

Right at the end of this great book, Knowing God, Dr. Packer has a chapter that is wonderfully insightful. It's entitled "Sons of God," and it deals specifically with the Bible concept of adoption. Once you become a Christian, he suggests, it's exactly as if God Himself has come down, hired the attorneys, paid the legal fees, gone through the rigamarole, signed the papers, helped you pack your suitcase . . . and taken you to live with Him! It's just as real as that! And then he goes on for a number of marvelous pages to explore with us just what it all implies. Would God ever go back on His adoption decision? Does He renege on His pledge, and drop off recalcitrant boys and girls at Lucifer's orphanage, saying as He drives off: "Sorry, kid. Changed My mind. You're not worth the bother, and you're for sure not worth Calvary"?

That sounds harsh, and we instinctively say "no" to the very idea. And yet, interestingly, this chapter by Packer begins with an assertion that, on its face, does seem a bit cold. Not everyone walking around in this world is a son or daughter of God, he writes. True, there is a sense in which "we are all God's children," as the expression goes, created in His image. But when the Bible speaks of adoption, it is referring to something much different, much higher, much more deliberate and ambitious.

"The idea that all are children of God is not found in the Bible anywhere," he writes. "The Old Testament shows God as the Father, not of all, but of His own people, the seed of Abraham. ‘Israel is My firstborn son, . . . "Let My son go."' That's in Exodus 4. "The New Testament has a world vision, but it too shows God as the Father, not of all, but of those who, knowing themselves to be sinners, put their trust in the Lord Jesus Christ as their divine sin-bearer and master, and so become Abraham's spiritual seed. ‘You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus.'"

And then he goes on to describe what an incredible experience it is to be adopted through this faith commitment, but he makes it clear — and so does the Bible — that we don't just fall out of the foster home and into God's mansion. Adoption is not a default human experience, but a deliberately chosen one. Here's a bit more:

"Sonship [or "daughter-ship"] to God is not, therefore, a universal status into which everyone enters by natural birth, but a supernatural gift which one receives through receiving Jesus. ‘No one comes to the Father' — in other words, is acknowledged by God as a son — ‘except through Me,'" it says in John 14:6. "The gift of sonship to God becomes ours not through being born, but through being born again."

Many Bibles link together, with references notes, John 14:6 and Acts 4:12, where we find again that there is just one avenue to full adoption. Notice:

"Salvation is found in no one else [but Jesus Christ], for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved."

As Packer puts it in the opening of his chapter:

"Sonship to God, then, is a gift of grace." Now notice: "It is not a natural but an adoptive sonship, and so the New Testament explicitly pictures it. In Roman law, it was a recognized practice for an adult who wanted an heir, and someone to carry on the family name, to adopt a male as his son — usually at age, rather than in infancy, as is the common way today. The apostles proclaim that God has so loved those whom He redeemed on the cross that He has adopted them all as His heirs, to see and share the glory into which His only begotten Son has already come. ‘God sent His Son . . . to redeem those under law, that we might receive the full [adoptive] rights of sons.'" That's in Galatians 4:4, 5.

And just one more Bible verse on this concept, just a couple of pages later, as Paul writes now to the Ephesians:

"[God] predestined us to be adopted as His sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with His pleasure and will — to the praise of His glorious grace."

You know, friend, in this world adoption is just plain a risky, scary word. It hints of insecurity, of second thoughts and second-class citizenship. We picture fragile relationships and a security as flimsy as a tired mother's whims. What we're going to find in heaven's kingdom, and in the Bible's descriptions of it, is an experience that is fullness beyond comprehension. Secure beyond all interference, and lasting beyond eternity. In other words, "Welcome home, kid. Forever."