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"GOOD NIGHT, YOU PRINCES OF MAINE — YOU KINGS OF NEW ENGLAND"

What kind of parent plays favorites, and loves one kid more than another? Well, a bad one, certainly, and God is certainly not a bad Father. He has a Son He loves very much, named Jesus Christ, of course. And other children too - that would be you and me. Does He love US just as much?

There's a wonderful story — unfortunately, we couldn't track down its source — about a father who had two daughters. One was born to him naturally, the other one adopted. And of course, insensitive people would invariably ask The Question: "Which one is really yours?"

For years this conscientious man had tried to love both girls equally, to treat them with impeccable fairness, to give one as many Christmas presents as the other. He had carefully set aside the idea of "blood" and treated them both as fully his. And yet the question was always asked: "John, which one is really yours?"

Finally he came up with the perfect answer. Scrunching up his face as if trying to retrieve a reluctant, hidden fact, he would confess: "You know, I do recall that one of them is adopted, but for the life of me I can't remember which one!"

We have two men here at the Voice of Prophecy in exactly that family arrangement: two daughters, one adopted. And I've admired how both of those dads have tried to make that their motto: "Sorry, I can't remember. I have two daughters – and they're both the jewels of my heart."

David Smith, our producer, was telling me that he adopted his older girl, Kami, when she was about eight. That moved her from step-daughter to real daughter, and the attorney who walked them through the process and did all the paperwork gave the new family a big smile. "Now, you folks be sure to go out for some ice cream or something," he advised. Well, that's legal counsel you're always happy to comply with . . . but you know, when you finally sign the papers and the adoption is complete and you go out for ice cream, friend, that's really just the very beginning of the adventure. There's a lot more to it than ice cream and setting up a baby room with pink wallpaper and a new bassinet. And it's the very same thing when we are adopted into God's family. That happens the moment you embrace the Christian message, but it then proceeds up a long, wonderful, thrilling, bumpy, challenging, rewarding road that leads to the eternal kingdom of God.

We enjoyed reading some excerpts yesterday from Dr. J. I. Packer's book, Knowing God, which has really been a second textbook for us during this series. And yesterday he pointed out that adoption is always a huge expression of love. Calvary and adoption are the two great yardsticks — that's a wonderful metaphor — for us to know just how much God really loves us. But now let's add, speaking of ice cream cones on Day One, what he says next about it all:
"The establishing of the child's status as a member of the family is only a beginning. The real task remains: to establish a genuinely filial relationship between your adopted child and yourself. It is this, above all, that you want to see. Accordingly, you set yourself to win the child's love by loving the child. You seek to excite affection by showing affection. So with God. And throughout our life in this world, and to all eternity beyond, He will constantly be showing us, in one way or another, more and more of His love, and thereby increasing our love to Him continually." And this next line just blows me away. "The prospect before the adopted children of God is an ETERNITY of love."

We kind of glaze over spiritually, maybe, when we read a promise like Jeremiah 31:3 — "I have loved you with an everlasting love" — but this is exactly what the new Christian has to look forward to once we've finished up that ice cream cone and gone home with our new Dad. He's going to devote Himself to winning our love by loving us first. What's more, He's never going to quit.

I don't know if you're familiar with the recent story told by John Irving entitled The Cider House Rules. It's all about orphans and adoptions, and the main character at St. Cloud's, the institute in snowy Maine, is a boy named Homer Wells. "Homer" after the ancient philosopher, and "Wells" because Dr. Larch, who ran the orphanage, thought he would grow up to be a deep thinker. But it's painful for the administrator of St. Cloud's to see the ups and downs of adoptions, where some last and some don't. "Add a child to your life or leave one behind," he sighs. And Homer is actually rejected two times by dissatisfied parents. "He never makes a sound," the first mother complains. "He never cries." With the second set, he cries all the time, and for good reason, because he's being abused. And, unlike the adoptions the Bible tells us about where salvation is never lost, little Homer twice goes from being somebody's son to NOT being somebody's son. "Twice adopted, twice returned." But the line made famous in both the book and the Tobey Maguire film is when this Dr. Larch turns out the lights at bedtime every evening. Because even though he is the caretaker of many and the father of none, this gentle man sees in these boys what God sees in all of us. And he says to them: "Good night, you princes of Maine, you kings of New England." At the end of the story, Larch is dead, and Homer Wells, now a teenager doomed to always be an orphan, takes over. He reads the usual bedtime story to the boys and then says the long-awaited line to his fellow orphans: "Good night, you princes of Maine, you kings of New England."

And I find that same imagery here in this great essay about adoption we've been sharing with you recently. How much does God love the orphans of this world as He seeks to adopt us and then to demonstrate His incredible love? Dr. Packer tells us a personal story:
"Once I knew a family," he writes, "in which the eldest son was adopted at a time when the parents thought they could have no children. When their natural-born children arrived later on, they diverted all their attention to them, and the adopted eldest was very obviously left ‘out in the cold.' It was painful to see and, judging by the look on the eldest's face, it was painful to experience. It was, of course, a miserable failure in parenthood. But in God's family things are not like that. Like the prodigal in the parable, we may only find ourselves able to say, ‘I have sinned . . . I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired men.'"

That's from Jesus' great Prodigal Son parable, of course, found in Luke 15. And is that how it is to be with us? The "second-class" status of always being the bad younger brother? The adopted kid who, like little Harry Potter, has to sleep in the cupboard under the stairs at Number Four Privet Drive, unlike the beloved REAL son, Dudley Dursley? Or Cosette in the great spiritual musical, Les Misérables, who is the orphan girl despised in favor of Eponine, the precious blood-related child of Monsieur and Mademoiselle Thenardiér?

No, friend, and listen to how J. I. Packer climaxes his wonderful description of our adoption. What does indeed come after the ice cream cone as we are welcomed into the family? What does Dad say when the prodigal son comes dragging home?
"But God receives us as sons," he writes, "and loves us with the same steadfast affection with which He eternally loves His beloved only-begotten. There are no distinctions of affection in the divine family. We are all loved just as fully as Jesus is loved."

Have you ever thought about that? I confess it never fully hit me until I encountered this remarkable Christian essay in Knowing God. But God the Father loves ME as much as He loves Jesus! He doesn't play favorites even between Christ, who's been with Him in perfect obedience and harmony since before the beginning of the universe, and ME! And according to the confession of Jesus Himself, His Father loves Him very much indeed. Right toward the end of His life here on earth, Jesus says to the disciples — He's about to die for each of them, by the way:
"I've loved you the way My Father has loved Me."

That's in John 15:9. And, speaking of the good-night gesture, "You kings of New England," in a grand conclusion Dr. Packer writes with true emotion:
"It is like a fairy story — the reigning monarch adopts waifs and strays to make princes of them. But, praise God, it is not a fairy story: it is hard and solid fact, founded on the bedrock of free and sovereign grace. This, and nothing less than this, is what adoption means. No wonder John cries, ‘Behold, what manner of love!' When once you understand adoption, your heart will cry the same."

I know we must hold to what the Bible says in Revelation 21 about there being no night in the City of God. Is that metaphor? Will the lion really lay down with the lamb? I haven't been to heaven to know what all is literal, and what is simply John's feeble poetic attempts to describe the glories of heaven. But would you forgive me for picturing a first bedtime up there in that Better Land? We've had that first banquet supper with God and Jesus. We've been welcomed home, and told that we can stay forever. And then God bids us goodnight, perhaps borrowing from John Irving: "Good night, you princes of Earth, you kings of all heaven."

You'd almost look forward to bedtime, wouldn't you?