Thursday, December 18, 2008

Adoption Shows The Greatness Of God's Love

"Our adoption shows us the greatness of God's love...Of all the gifts of grace, adoption is the highest....When you realize that God has taken you from the gutter, so to speak, and made you a son in his own house - you, a miraculously pardoned offender, guilty, ungrateful, defiant, perverse as you were - then your sense of God's "love beyond degree" is more than words can express.

In the ancient world, adoption was a practice ordinarily confined to the childless well-to-do. Its subjects, as we said earlier, were not normally infants, as today, but young adults who had shown themselves fit and able to carry on a family name in a worthy way. In this case, however God adopts us out of free love, not because our character and record show us worthy to bear his name, but despite the fact that they show the very opposite. We are not fit for a place in God's family; the idea of his loving and exalting us sinners as he loves and exalted the Lord Jesus sounds ludicrous and wild - yet that, and nothing less than that, is what our adoption means."
J.I. Packer, Knowing God pg.214-215

I wish that I could get this truth deep down into the hearts of every Christian I know. The realization that God did not choose you and adopt you into his family because of something that he saw in you. But out of His great love and grace he took you and I out of the gutter of our sins, despite the fact that we were guilty, ungrateful, proud, and defiant sinners and gave us a place in his family. What a God! What a great Salvation!

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