Adoption and Multiplication

John 1 :12-13
"But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name: who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God."

Dear Jesus,

I have a deep craving to know You.  I want to experience the kind of intimacy with You that characterizes healthy family relationships.  

I am thankful for my earthly father.  I admire him and want to emulate him.  His example models holiness, perfect love, integrity.  He has shown me You. I cherish a phone call, a visit in the living room, a conversation around the dinner table.  I am strengthened by His words of affirmation, comfort, and guidance.  My father gives my life a certain kind of predictability, order, and direction.  

And You tell me that You want me to become Your son.  You offer to be my Father.

William Barclay observes that "There can be contact without communion; there can be relationship without fellowship. All men are the sons of God in the sense that they owe to him the creation and the preservation of their lives; but only some men become the sons of God in the depth and intimacy of the true father and son relationship. It is the claim of John that men can enter into that true and real sonship only through Jesus Christ... We cannot make ourselves sons of God; we have to enter into a relationship which God offers us. No man can ever enter into friendship with God by his own will and power; there is a great gulf fixed between the human and the divine. Man can only enter into friendship with God when God himself opens the way... It is so with us and God. We cannot by will or achievement enter into the relationship of fellowship with god, for we are men and God is God. We can only enter into it when God, in His totally undeserved grace, condescends in love to open the way to Himself."  (William Barclay in The Gospel of John, 1955, pp. 41-43).

I am thankful for an earthly father who has modeled my pathway into the heart of my Heavenly Father.  I embrace the intimacy of communion to which You are calling me.  I embrace Your call to adoption and sonship.  Thank You for obeying Your Father's will, thus opening the way for me to become a child of God.

"But there is a human side to this. What God offers, man has to appropriate... God offers us the right to become sons, but we need not accept that right. We do accept it through believing in the name of Jesus Christ... It is what Jesus is that opens to us the possibility of becoming the children of God" (ibid., p. 43).

You have given me an invitation to become Your brother, Jesus.  You show no jealousy in welcoming me to Your Father's love.  Now, He is my Father too.  

I remember when my sister and brother-in-law adopted their first child.  This once childless couple were now parents.  Miraculously, You opened my sister's womb and she subsequently bore two more children.  Adoption begat multiplication!  

That is Your challenge to me.  Even as Jesus, the Son of God, opened the way for me to be adopted as a child of God, I am responsible to open that avenue of grace, straight into the Father heart of God, for others.  Adoption begets multiplication.

So, I worship You, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  I thank You for the wonderful reality of adoption.  I thank You for my earthly father who modeled Father God to me.  I thank You for my earthly son and many spiritual sons who have stirred my own father-love, providing me a glimpse of Your own.  I thank You for my nephew who teaches me a beautiful lesson of Your doctrine of adoption.  

In the Name of my Heavenly Father, my elder brother--Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit,

Amen.