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THE PERFECT ADOPTION #15

WHEN JOHNNY COMES RIDING HOME

In most adoptions, parent and child meet immediately - often at the maternity ward of the hospital. What will it be like, though, for God's children: adopted by a heavenly Father we have never met? And finally the day comes when at last you stand face to face?

In Attleboro, Massachusetts, a young girl named Marion Rivers had a job working for General Plate Division of Metals and Controls Corporation. They made rolled gold plate for jewelry, but converted over to wartime pursuits when World War II swept around the globe. Soon Marion and her co-workers were instead turning out technical instruments for the Allied forces over across the Atlantic. In his book, The Greatest Generation, NBC anchor Tom Brokaw relates her pride, more than half a century later, when the Army and Navy combined to give her company an "E for excellence," with a huge banner they could fly.

But there was one more way Marion and her fellow employees could help the war effort. Because troop trains often went right through Attleboro on their way to Camp Myles Standish, which was a common launching point for soldiers heading over to the European war theater. And she remembers forming an assembly line of sorts, putting fruit, candy, and gum into baskets for the GIs. Then, before climbing up the steep cinder-covered banks to get to the train tracks, she and the other girls would go to the ladies' room and carefully peel off their silk stockings, which were "as scarce as hen's teeth – shredding those stockings would have been catastrophic." The soldiers would whoop and cheer as the pretty girls handed over the baskets of treats.

"[They] were heading for the unknown," she recalls. "Later we'd be back in the office, covered with coal dust . . . but we loved it."

And that was a common picture, Brokaw writes, in the 1940s.

"America . . . was a nation of railroad tracks and trains. Railroad stations in small towns and cities were crowded with men in uniform, their wives and sweethearts giving a last embrace before the trains departed for a distant port and for the war in Europe or the Pacific." Then he soberly adds: "Later, those same trains returned with the young men, now greatly changed. They brought home the wounded and they bore the caskets of those who didn't make it."

This young woman, Marion Rivers, has a mental snapshot of the returning trains, now sometimes with shades drawn. There were no cheering troops, no baskets of candy and gum. But the war was over and wounded men were coming home to their families.

Well, friend, it's a poignant, moving picture. The great conflict is ended. Some have paid the ultimate price. But now the long-departed war hero can embrace his wife, hug his mom, have Dad drape a manly arm around him and shed a masculine tear. Drive home for a Sunday dinner, with a big banner on the front porch. "Welcome home!" And so often, during and after World War II, these brave men could know that their tour of duty was over. They could buy a house now, get married, settle down and help build a family and a new world of freedom.

We bring up this end-of-the-war motif for a good reason today. We've been studying for a good three weeks now the concept of adoption — how the son or daughter of God has truly been adopted into heaven's family. Yes, we have battle scars. Yes, we've been overseas, so to speak, for the duration of a long, painful conflict. But soon there will be a gospel train coming to take us back home to be with Dad.

Our second textbook of sorts for this series is entitled Knowing God, by the wonderful professor of theology, James Packer. Yesterday we were studying the second of five great benefits we enjoy as God's adopted children. Here it is again in case you missed it:

"Our adoption," Packer writes, "shows us the glory of the Christian hope."

And we thought together about the reality that heaven and mansions and fellowship with God are what every single Christian — guaranteed, in writing — has waiting for him or her. In fact, God loves us as much as He loves His own Son, Jesus! No favorites! The same glory Christ enjoys throughout eternity, we're going to experience as well.

And then Dr. Packer also gives a kind of biblical picture of trains pulling into the station, if you will. Of homecoming and embraces. Listen to this:

"Finally, the doctrine of adoption tells us that the experience of heaven will be of a family gathering, as the great host of the redeemed meet together in face-to-face fellowship with their Father-God and Jesus their Brother." Then he adds: "This is the deepest and clearest idea of heaven that the Bible gives us. Many Scriptures point to it."

Did you know that? Yes, we read about beautiful mansions and seas of glass and streets of gold and lions and lambs lying down together in harmony. But even more, the Bible promises, this adoption, this awaiting glory, involves reunion and togetherness.
He takes us through five familiar promises from God's Word. John 17:24:

"Father, I want those You have given Me to be with Me where I am, and to see My glory."

Matthew 5:8:

"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God."

I John 3:2:

"They will see His face."

I Corinthians 13:12:

"Then we shall see face to face."

And maybe best of all, because the train doesn't just bring Johnny home, but now Johnny and Dad will be reunited for a long, long, wonderfully long time — I Thessalonians 4:17:

"And so we will be with the Lord forever."

Maybe you recall the scene from the unforgettable Christian film, Shadowlands, by Richard Attenborough, where Joy Davidson, the cancer-stricken wife of C. S. Lewis, is able to come home from the hospital. The disease is in remission for the moment, and she can come home. Well, friend, that's just a pale shadow of the joy of heaven, where all diseases are banned forever, where tears are wiped away permanently, and where you don't just rent a hotel suite next to God for one expensive weekend, but you get to have Him next door for the next billion years or so. Packer adds this thought:

"It will be like the day when the sick child is at last able to leave the hospital and finds Father and the whole family waiting outside to greet him — a family occasion, if there ever was one. ‘I see myself now at the end of my journey, my toilsome days are ended,' said Bunyan's Mr. Stand-fast, as he stood halfway into Jordan's water, ‘the thought of what I am going to, and of the conduct that waits for me on the other side, doth lie as a glowing coal at my heart. . . . I have formerly lived by hearsay, and faith, but now I go where I shall live by sight, and shall be with Him, in whose company I delight myself.'"

Isn't that beautiful? What will it be like to know that the journey is over? "When all my labors and trials are o'er, And I am safe on that beautiful shore." And yes, that will be glory for me. Not glory FOR me, as in praise and adulation coming my direction. There at the train station, I think all the praise needs to go to Jesus, who paid for the tickets. Right? But friend, it certainly is going to be glorious for us to be there, to share in the glory of heaven, the glory of Jesus.

The Internet gremlins came along right at this juncture, and pointed out to us a great name from the history books. Richard Baxter was a grand old preacher in the days of the Puritans; in fact, the London News referred to him once as "the great Puritan divine." This same J. I. Packer we've been using as a resource wrote extensively about Pastor Baxter in a book entitled Among God's Giants. For years Baxter was the Vicar of Kidderminster, there in England, and one historian noted several centuries later:

"Kidderminster without [Baxter] would have been famous for nothing but its carpets."

He wrote prolifically, something like 40,000 "closely printed pages." His book, The Reformed Pastor, brought hundreds of families into the Church. "He converted just about the whole town," Packer writes, according to this Internet report reprinted from Banner of Truth magazine. Another book of his, A Call to the Unconverted, ran through, in its first year of printing, 20,000 copies, and "brought an unending stream of readers to faith during Baxter's lifetime," writes Maurice Roberts.

He was also a man of strict conscience, a non-conformist. In the tumultuous 1600s, when the Anglican Church was endeavoring to revise its prayer book, an Act of Uniformity required ministers to adhere instead to the old, unreformed book. Baxter, with many others, would not go along, and he actually spent a week in Clerkenwell Jail (or G-A-O-L, as they spelled it back then) and almost two years in Southwark Jail.

He also, by the way, was a very sickly man, "subject to constant pain, sickness, and disability," says Maurice Roberts. He "preached as a dying man to dying men," says another. And right at the close of this great "adoption" essay by J. I. Packer, he includes a poem or song which Richard Baxter wrote on April 10, 1660 — at the height of his greatest challenges:

"My knowledge of that life is small; The eye of faith is dim: But it's enough that Christ knows all; And I shall be with Him."

That's very moving, isn't it? And Packer quietly concludes:

"If you are a BELIEVER, and so an ADOPTED CHILD, this prospect satisfies you completely; if it does not strike you as satisfying, it would seem that as yet you are neither."

Well, friend, let me tell you: I want to be both.