"Wonderful, Holy Adoption"

A young couple had been trying for years to have a child, but with no success. Finally, they decided to adopt a child from another country. When they went to tell their parents, they got a kind, but clear rebuff. "Wouldn’t it be better to have one of your own?" A little taken back, they gathered their thoughts and replied, "This child will be our own, just as if he or she had been born to us. This child will be part of our family in every way."

As we consider the word "adoption" according to our sinful way of thinking, we understand the future grandparent’s thoughts. At the same time, we see the wonder and the excitement of the future parents. In the same way, this passage can lead to two ways of thinking about being adopted by God.

Our sinfulness clouds our thinking about adoption. From the perspective of a grandparent, grandkids that are your own blood descendants hold a more special place than the grandkids that are from another relationship, and not really your own flesh and blood relative and descendant. And that’s probably a self-centered perspective, and I’m not even saying its right, but that’s just the way things have worked out.

It’s easy to shut people out. It’s easy to come up with artificial criteria by which we negatively judge others. Some people are even prejudiced against others that don’t have quite the same shade of skin as they do, even if they’re just a child.

This is because our thinking is clouded by sin. Ever since the fall of Adam, our thinking has been greatly limited, and that limitation is often selfish in nature. We see things only from an earthly perspective, not God’s heavenly perspective. We take care of number one first, and often look for the "what’s in it for me" in many situations.

When Adam sinned, all things became less than what God had designed. God didn’t design Adam and Eve to die. But now death would be the penalty for sin. Our minds were not as clear and able to comprehend spiritual things like they could before the fall. Our relationships began to fall apart, with brother killing brother from the first generation of naturally born humans. Our human nature turned in on itself, and now we can see things no other way but selfishly.

That means that we don’t see God’s action of adopting us in a positive light either. We don’t want God to do stuff for us. We want to do it on our own. We want to make ourselves acceptable to him and make ourselves His children through our own actions. We people continuously come up with, or try to come up with new ways to become children of God. This means that we reject to workings of the Holy Spirit in our hearts.

Against this backdrop of condemning action on the part of our sinful minds, if we examine our text, we see something quite different. In contrast to the sinful way we think of adoption, God sending us his Son shows how wonderful our adoption into the holy family is.

God’s love causes him to look at everything differently than the way we look at things. His love is always oriented towards his creation. Not only does he give us life and health, he also wants to give us the goodness of heaven and to bring us into a perfect relationship with him. God took the action necessary to restore mankind to himself.

When the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the l, to redeem those under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. God chose the perfect time to send forth the Messiah.

In war, timing is everything. During WWII, as general Eisenhower and his staff planned the D-day attack, the invasion of Europe against the heavily fortified German defenses, choosing a date was crucial. There were so many factors to consider: the proper placement of troops, the proper number of troops, the supply lines for those troops, the weather, and the support from underground resistance on the European mainland.

All these factors were highly critical in determining the time of the attack. Up to the very last hours, bad weather threatened to delay and maybe even derail the plan.

The same was true when God sent the Messiah. The Greek language had become an international language, so the Good News could be spread far and wide. The Roman Empire had spread so far that travel and communication were much easier. Missionaries could travel on reasonably safe Roman roads.

The Jewish people had a sense that the time was right for the Messiah to come. In fact, some historians claim that it was rather popular to name one’s son "Joshua," the Hebrew form of the name "Jesus," which of course means "Savior." Although Jesus butted heads with the Pharisees and the ruling class of the Jews, the people readily accepted Jesus as the Messiah.

God, in His infinite wisdom, chose, in the words of our text the fullness of time to bring the world exactly what it needed to be saved from certain condemnation in hell. Into this perfect timing, God sent forth His Son. He was born just like we are. He was a human being, just like us, so that he could actually be a substitute for man. He was born under the Law. Ever since the fall of Adam, all men have been under the Law. Our sinful condition and sinful actions show that we are deserving of God’s wrath and not His love.

But God sent His Son to redeem, to buy, to ransom, to rescue us from loss. Jesus did more than just stand in for us. He came to remove our eternal condemnation, a situation that we can do nothing about. Our adoption is the finest, most magnificent gift. This fact that we have been adopted tells us that we have not only been rescued from the grips of hell, but that we also have a whole new identity as children in God’s very own family. This is hard to understand and even harder to believe.

But we are able to believe it because God the Holy Spirit has been placed in our hearts, creating faith and bringing us the gifts of forgiveness, eternal life, joy, and the fellowship of the Christian family of believers.

We not only have God in us personally, we know the Spirit lives in us and, we can and do, call out to our heavenly Father with the endearing Hebrew title Abba. We are no longer enslaved to ourselves, our sin, the world or the devil. We are truly God’s children and we can go to him anytime with our prayers.

The words of our text are only four verses of Paul’s letter to the Galatians. Almost out of character for some of Paul’s writings, he uses short sentences and gets right to the point. The Greek is four sentences, just like our English translation. When I looked at the Greek, it really did look like Paul chose his words very carefully. No wasted words. No long, drawn out sentences. Straight and to the point.

Since Paul’s letter is straightforward and to the point, the last two words of our text are just as meaningful as the rest of our text. They also express a fundamental truth of Christianity. What are the last two words of our text? "Through God." Everything good always comes through God, Christ, and the cross.

That’s why, even at Christmas, with the beautiful decorations and music, we still have the cross prominently displayed. Christmas always points to Good Friday and Easter, when God finalized the action that was required to make us his.

The young couple who were a bit taken aback by their parents’ remarks did go forward and adopted a little girl from Korea. As time went on, it became very obvious that the little girl was as much a part of the family as their biological children born later. In fact, she has now married and given three great-grandchildren to those grandparents ho were so hesitant.

It’s the same in God’s family. As we are adopted into his holy forever family, we have the high privilege, as God the Holy Spirit leads us, to be used by God to bring more children into His family. How incredible it is that through faith in Jesus, we have received holy adoption. All praise be to God. Amen.