Adoption Fee Paid in Full

The Father has loved us so much! This shows how much he loved us: We are called children of God. And we really are his children. But the people in the world don’t understand that we are God’s children, because they have not known him. Dear friends, now we are children of God. We have not yet been shown what we will be in the future. But we know that when Christ comes again, we will be like him. We will see him just as he is. He is pure, and everyone who has this hope in him keeps themselves pure like Christ. (I John 3:1-3)

I have the rare privilege of being a child of God, adopted into his family, chosen to be his follower. How about you? Relationship with Jesus is the beginning of a life lived under different leadership - self no longer leading the way, but God's Spirit giving us direction. Some children have a birthright because they are 'born into' a family. Others are adopted into a family and know the love of the Father because he has chosen to give them a place within a family. Parents see children as a gift, not a possession. They know the 'relationship' that is formed is permanent - they don't just walk away from it. The other thing we know about parents is that their love is often very self-sacrificing. They'd give everything to help their child. God gave his 'everything' in the form of his Son, taking on human flesh, dying on the cross, so each of us could come into this family of God. Adopted - wanted more than anything else - accepted without question.

If the child disobeys, does the parent stop loving the child or seeking the best outcome for that child? Not at all! In fact, it is not uncommon to see a parent 'double-down' in the intensity of their love at those hard moments when discipline is required in order to see the child restored. Why? The intensity of a parent's love for their child goes beyond the 'reasonable' - it requires 'unreasonable' sacrifices at times. The drive to protect the child is deeper than we can truly understand until we become parents ourselves. Even then, we have a limited view of what God's love must truly be like. God's love makes things 'right' when all that we do and say is pretty much 'wrong'. It looks beyond the act of sin and sees us through eyes of forgiveness - all because of this deep, 'unreasonable', and sometimes 'irrational' love of a Father for his child. 

God gives us all the rights, position, love, and care that a parent gives their child. For those of us with no 'birthright', take heart! He has given us a family and holds us as close to his heart as his children. He always wanted you as part of His family and we should be overjoyed that he pursued us even when we were less than lovely, sinners of all types, and far away from being 'loveable'. Some of us struggle with what the world refers to as a positive self-esteem. We might think we don’t have any value - especially to a holy God who wants us to be holy as he is holy. Our sense of value comes from Him, not from ourselves, anything we can do ourselves, or in what we might find in any self-help course. As a child, fully adopted into his family, we find value beyond anything this world could offer. Just sayin!