Adopted for Life (Updated and Expanded Edition) E-Book

Russell Moore

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 457

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

The doctrine of adoption—God's decision to adopt sinful men and women into his family—stands at the heart of Christianity. In light of this, Christians' efforts to adopt beautifully illustrate the truth of the gospel. In this popular-level and practical manifesto, Russell Moore encourages Christians to adopt children and to help other Christian families to do the same. He shows that adoption is not just about couples who have struggled to have children. Rather, it's about an entire culture within evangelicalism—a culture that sees adoption as part of the Great Commission mandate and as a sign of the gospel itself.

Leseprobe

Adopted for Life

The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches

Updated and Expanded Edition

Russell Moore

Adopted for Life

Copyright © 2009, 2015 by Russell Moore

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law.

First edition, 2009. Updated and expanded edition, 2015.

Cover design: Tim Green, Faceout Studio

Cover image: Getty Images

First printing 2015

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-4921-2 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-4924-3 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-4922-9 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-4923-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Moore, Russell, 1971–

Adopted for life : the priority of adoption for Christian families and churches / Russell D. Moore.—Updated and expanded edition.

    1 online resource

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4335-4922-9 (pdf) – ISBN 978-1-4335-4923-6 (mobi) – ISBN 978-1-4335-4924-3 (epub) – ISBN 978-1-4335-4921-2 (tp)

1. Adoption—Religious aspects—Christianity. I. Title.

HV875.26          

248.8'44—dc23                                                 2015013876

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

To Benjamin and Timothy, of course.

You are my beloved sons, and with you I am well pleased.

Contents

Cover PageTitle PageCopyrightDedication1Adoption, Jesus, and YouWhy You Should Read This Book, Especially If YouDon’t Want To2Are They Brothers?What Some Rude Questions about Adoption TaughtMe about the Gospel of Christ3Joseph of Nazareth vs. Planned ParenthoodWhat’s at Stake When We Talk about Adoption4Don’t You Want Your Own Kids?How to Know If You—or Someone You Love—Should Consider Adoption5Paperwork, Finances, and Other Threats to Personal SanctificationHow to Navigate the Practical Aspects of theAdoption Process6Decisions You Never Thought You’d Have to MakeHow to Think about Gender, Race, and Other Uncomfortable Adoption Decisions7Adoption Can Wreck Your Life (and That’s Not Necessarily a Bad Thing)How to Think about Counting the Cost of Orphan Care8It Takes a Village to Adopt a ChildHow Churches Can Encourage Adoption9“Adopted” Is a Past-Tense VerbHow Parents, Children, and Friends Can Think about Growing Up Adopted10Abba Changes EverythingWhat I’ve Learned in the Years Since Adopting11Concluding ThoughtsAfterwordAcknowledgmentsScripture IndexGeneral Index

1

Adoption, Jesus, and You

Why You Should Read This Book, Especially If You Don’t Want To

My sons have a certain look in their eyes when they are conspiring to do something wrong. They have another, similar look when they are trying to read my face to see if I think what they’re doing is something wrong. It was this second look I could see buzzing across both of their faces as they walked up the steps to the old pulpit.

My boys were at a chapel service on the campus where I serve to train pastors for Christian ministry; they were there to hear me preach. They know better than to misbehave in church, and this seemed kind of like a church service. They also knew that I had warned them they could only sit up on the front row if they were still and quiet, with nothing distracting going on down there while I was preaching. But a friend of mine had other plans for them that day.

“Benjamin and Timothy,” he had whispered only a few minutes earlier to my sons, “will you help me introduce your daddy before he preaches?” I fidgeted with my uncomfortable over-the-ear microphone while I watched these two strong, vibrant, little five-year-old boys walk up the platform steps. They were peering at me the whole time to make sure they weren’t breaking the rules that we’d agreed upon. I watched them stand behind the pulpit and listened to them answer questions from my colleague. “Who is going to preach today?” my friend asked. “Daddy,” Benjamin responded. “And what’s he going to preach about?” he continued. Timothy answered quickly, leaning into the microphone, “Jesus.”

For a couple of seconds, my mind flashed back to the first time I ever saw these two boys. They were lying in excrement and vomit, covered in heat blisters and flies, in an orphanage somewhere in a little mining community in Russia. Maria and I had applied to adopt and had gone on the first of two trips, not knowing who, if anyone, we would find waiting for us. Immediately upon landing in the former Soviet Union, I wondered if we had made the worst mistake of our lives.

Sitting in a foreign airport, with the smell of European perfume, human sweat, and cigarette smoke wafting all around us, Maria and I recommitted to God that we would trust him and that we would adopt whomever he directed us to, regardless of what medical or emotional problems they might have. A Russian judge told us she had two “gray-eyed” boys picked out for us, both of whom had been abandoned by their mothers to a hospital in the little village about an hour from where we were staying.

Sure enough, the orphanage authorities, through our translators, cataloged a terrifying list of medical problems—including fetal alcohol syndrome—for one, if not both, of the boys. My wife and I looked at each other as if to say, “This is what the Lord has for us, so here we go.” The nurse led us up some stairs, down a dank hallway, and into a tiny room with two beds. I can still see the younger of the two, now Timothy, rocking up and down against the bars of his crib, grinning widely. The older, now Benjamin, was more reserved, stroking my five o’clock shadow with his hand and seeing (I came to realize) a man most probably for the very first time in his life. Both the boys had hair matted down on their heads, and one of them had crossed eyes. Both of them moved slowly and rigidly, almost like stop-motion clay animated characters from the Christmas television specials of our 1970s childhoods. And we loved them both, at an intuitive and almost primal level, from the very first second.

The transformation of these two ex-orphans into the sons I saw behind the pulpit that day and see every day of my life running through my house with Lego toys and construction-paper drawings motivates me to write this book. The thought that there are thousands more like them in orphanages in Russia, in government facilities in China, and in foster care systems in the United States haunts me enough to sit at this computer and type.

I don’t know who you are, reading this book. Maybe you’re standing in a bookstore, flipping past these pages. Maybe you’re reading this book a few minutes at a time, keeping it in a drawer so your spouse won’t see it. Maybe you never thought you’d read a book about adoption. Maybe you’re wondering if you should.

Well, okay. I never thought I’d write a book about adoption, as you’ll see soon enough. Like I said, I don’t know who you are. But I know that I am writing this to you. I invite you to spend the next little bit thinking with me about a subject that has everything to do with you, whoever you are.

Whenever I told people I was working on a book on adoption, they’d often say something along the lines of, “Great. So, is the book about the doctrine of adoption or, you know, real adoption?” That’s a hard question to answer because you can’t talk about the one without talking about the other. Also, it is not as though we master one aspect and then move to the other—from the vertical to the horizontal or the other way around. That’s not the picture God has embedded in his creation work.

The Bible tells us that human families are reflective of an eternal fatherhood (Eph. 3:14–15). We know, then, what human fatherhood ought to look like on the basis of how our Father God behaves toward us. But the reverse is also true. We see something of the way our God is fatherly toward us through our relationships with human fathers. And so Jesus tells us that in our human father’s provision and discipline we get a glimpse of God’s active love for us (Matt. 7:9–11; cf. Heb. 12:5–17). The same truth is at work in adoption.

Adoption is, on the one hand, gospel. In this, adoption tells us who we are as children of the Father. Adoption as gospel tells us about our identity, our inheritance, and our mission as sons of God. Adoption is also defined as mission. In this, adoption tells us our purpose in this age as the people of Christ. Missional adoption spurs us to join Christ in advocating for the helpless and the abandoned.

As soon as you peer into the truth of the one aspect, you fall headlong into the truth of the other, and vice versa. That’s because it’s the way the gospel is. Jesus reconciles us to God and to each other. As we love our God, we love our neighbor; as we love our neighbor, we love our God. We believe Jesus in heavenly things—our adoption in Christ; so we follow him in earthly things—the adoption of children. Without the theological aspect, the emphasis on adoption too easily is seen as mere charity. Without the missional aspect, the doctrine of adoption too easily is seen as mere metaphor.

But adoption is contested, both in its cosmic and missional aspects. The Scriptures tell us there are unseen beings in the air around us who would rather we not think about what it means to be who we are in Christ. These rulers of this age would rather we ignore both the eternal reality and the earthly icon of it. They would rather we find our identity, our inheritance, and our mission according to what we can see and verify as ours—according to what the Bible calls “the flesh” (Romans 8)—rather than according to the veiled rhythms of the Spirit of life. That’s why adoption isn’t charity—it’s war.

The gospel of Jesus Christ means our families and churches ought to be at the forefront of the adoption of orphans close to home and around the world. As we become more attuned to the gospel, we’ll have more of a burden for orphans. As we become more adoption friendly, we’ll be better able to understand the gospel. This book calls us to look forward to an adoptive missional church. In this book I want to call us all to consider how encouraging adoption—whether we adopt or whether we help others adopt—can help us peer into the ancient mystery of our faith in Christ and can help us restore the fracturing unity and the atrophied mission of our congregations.

It is one thing when the culture doesn’t “get” adoption. What else could one expect when all of life is seen as the quest of “selfish genes” for survival? It is one thing when the culture doesn’t “get” adoption and so speaks of buying a cat as “adopting” a pet. But when those who follow Christ think the same way, we betray that we miss something crucial about our own salvation.

Adoption is not just about couples who want children—or who want more children. Adoption is about an entire culture within our churches, a culture that sees adoption as part of our Great Commission mandate and as a sign of the gospel itself. This book is intended for families who want to adopt and wonder whether they should. It is also intended for parents with children who’ve been adopted and who wonder how to raise them from here. It is for middle-aged fathers and mothers whose children have just told them they are thinking about adoption.

But this book is also, and perhaps most especially, for the man who flinches when his wife raises the issue of adoption because he wants his “own kids”—and who hates himself a little for thinking like that. It is for the wife who keeps the adoption application papers in a pile on the exercise bicycle upstairs—as a “last resort”—but who is praying fervently right now for two lines of purple to show up on her home pregnancy test. It is for the single twentysomething who assumes that he will marry after a couple of years in the post-college job force, find a nice girl, have a honeymoon for three or four years, and then they’ll start thinking about getting pregnant. It is for the pastor who preaches about adoption as an alternative to abortion on a Sanctity of Human Life Sunday but who has never considered how to envision for his congregation what it would mean to see family after family after family in the church directory in which the children bear little physical resemblance to, and maybe even don’t share the skin color of, their parents. It is for the elderly couple who tithe their Social Security check, dote on their grandchildren, and wonder how they can tangibly help the young couple who ask for prayer every month that they might be parents—and who never seem to show up for Mother’s Day services.

Before we begin, though, let me tell you what this book is not. It is not a step-by-step guide to navigating the adoption process, complete with legal advice and agency recommendations. There are good resources available on those things. Second, even if I set out to write a book like that, the whirl of change in this area is such that it would probably be out-of-date by the time you read it. In the United States, state laws change sometimes month to month. Around the world, countries authorize international adoption and then close down, only to reopen later. Those logistical issues are much easier than you think. Finding out the reputation and competency of an adoption agency, whether Christian or secular, is not much more complicated than a Google search. And the process itself is mapped out, in as much detail as possible, by a good agency.

Instead I want to ask what it would mean if our churches and families were known as the people who adopt babies—and toddlers, and children, and teenagers. What if we as Christians were known, once again, as the people who take in orphans and make of them beloved sons and daughters?

Not everyone is called to adopt. No one wants parents who adopt children out of the same sense of duty with which they may give to the building fund for the new church gymnasium. But all of us have a stake in the adoption issue, because Jesus does. He is the one who tells us his Father is also “Father of the fatherless” (Ps. 68:5). He is the one who insists on calling “the least of these” his “brothers” (Matt. 25:40) and who tells us that the first time we hear his voice, he will be asking us if we did the same.

I don’t know why, in the mystery of God’s plan, you were led to pick up this book. But I know this: you have a stake in the adoption issue, even if you never adopt a child. There’s a war going on around you—and perhaps within you—and adoption is one crucial arena of that war. With that in mind, there are perhaps some changes to be made in our lives. For some of us, I hope this book changes the makeup of our households. For some of us, I hope it helps change our monthly bank account balances. For all of us, I hope it changes something of the way we say “brother” and “sister” in our pews next Sunday and the way we cry out “Father” on our knees tonight.

This book is less about a dogmatic set of assertions (although there are some of those) than it is a conversation with you about what I have seen and what I’ve been taught through adoption and what I hope we can all learn together.

And as we start this conversation together, I can’t help but think again of the image of my sons standing behind that pulpit. I’ll admit I was proud of them that day, as I am every day. I don’t idealize them. They are sinners, like all of us. They deserve to be in hell forever, like all of us. And sometimes they are selfish, whining brats—just like their dad.

That day in that chapel, though, I managed to forget about my fatherly pride for a few minutes—and certainly to forget about adoption and orphanages and the events that led to our becoming parents. I just stood up and preached. When I finished, prayed, and walked down the steps from the pulpit, one of my sons, Benjamin, stepped out to the front of the chapel to shake my hand. Where did this little man come from, who stood with such dignity to tell his daddy he loved him and was proud of him? That probably didn’t seem to anyone in the room like an act of warfare—but, oh, how it was.

As I knelt down and hugged him, I realized how small and shallow and needy I had been when, only a few years ago, I had refused to go with my wife to an adoption seminar. I’d been “too busy” to go. “My life’s a whirlwind right now, you know,” I’d said to her at the time. But, really, the idea of adoption left me cold. Now, I was pro-adoption, of course, as a social and political matter (hadn’t I been saying that in my pro-life writings and speeches for years?). But why couldn’t we wait and exhaust all the ethically appropriate reproductive technologies before thinking about adoption? I told my wife, “I don’t mind adopting a few years down the road, but I want my first child to be mine.” I can still hear my voice saying those words—and it sounds so small and pitiable and hellish now.

How could I have known what it was like to hold this little boy in my arms, and his brother with him, knit together with them by a fatherhood that surpassed my genetic code? How could I have read and preached and lectured on Ephesians and Galatians and Romans, how could I have lectured through classroom notes on the doctrine of adoption, without ever seeing this? I wasn’t evil—or, at least, I wasn’t any more evil on this score than any other redeemed sinner—but I was as theologically and spiritually vacuous as the television “prosperity gospel” preachers I made fun of with my theologically sophisticated friends.

Some of you are in the place where I was several years ago. Some of you are where I am now. Some of you are where I will be, by God’s grace, when I pronounce one of my sons husband to a godly woman or when I hug one of them as he receives his high-school diploma or, best of all, when I baptize one of them as my brother in Christ.

This book isn’t, first of all, a theological treatise on adoption in the abstract, although I hope it helps some of us to see how adoption pictures something true about our God and his ways. This book isn’t primarily a book about the practical joys and challenges of adopting children, although I hope it helps many more moms and dads to know firsthand something of why I am wiping away tears as I type this right now. Ultimately, this book isn’t really about adoption at all. It’s just what my son Timothy probably would tell you it is about, if you asked him. It’s about Jesus.

2

Are They Brothers?

What Some Rude Questions about Adoption Taught Me about the Gospel of Christ

“So, are they brothers?” the woman asked. My wife, Maria, and I, jet-lagged from just returning from Russia, looked at each other wearily. This was the twelfth time since we returned that we’d been asked this question. When I looked back at the woman’s face, she had her eyebrows raised. “Are they?” she repeated. “Are they brothers?”

This lady was looking at some pictures, printed off a computer, of two one-year-old boys in a Russian orphanage, boys who had only days earlier been pronounced by a Russian court to be our children, after the legally mandated waiting period had elapsed for the paperwork to go through. Maria and I had returned to Kentucky to wait for the call to return to pick up our children and had only these pictures of young Maxim and Sergei, our equivalent of a prenatal sonogram, to show to our friends and relatives back home. But people kept asking, “Are they brothers?”

“They are now,” I replied. “Yes,” the woman said. “I know. But are they really brothers?” Clenching my jaw, and repeating Beatitudes to myself silently in my mind, I coolly responded, “Yes, now they are both our children, so they are now really brothers.” The woman sighed, rolled her eyes, and said, “Well, you know what I mean.”

Of course, we did know what she meant. What she wondered was whether these two boys, born three weeks apart, share a common biological ancestry, a common bloodline, some common DNA. It struck me that this question betrayed what most of us tend to view as really important when it comes to sonship: traceable genetic material.

This is the reason people would also ask us, “Now, do you have any children of your own?” And it is the reason newspaper obituaries will often refer to the deceased’s “adopted child,” as though this were the equivalent of a stepchild or a protégé rather than a real offspring.

During the weeks that Maria and I waited anxiously for the call to return to Russia to receive our children, I pondered this series of questions. As I read through the books of Ephesians and Galatians and Romans, it occurred to me that this is precisely the question that was faced by the apostle Paul and the first-century Christian churches.

As pig-flesh-eating Gentile believers—formerly goddess worshipers and Caesar magnifiers and all the rest—began confessing Jesus as the Messiah, some Jewish Christians demanded to know, “Are they circumcised?” This meant, of course, “Are they really part of us? Are they our brothers?” The Gentile believers would respond, “Yes, with the circumcision made without hands, the circumcision of Christ.” From the heated letters of the New Testament, it’s evident that the response to that was along the lines of, “Yes, but are you really circumcised . . . and you know what I mean.”

This was no peripheral issue. For the apostle Paul, the unity of the church as a household has everything to do with the gospel itself. And where the tribal fracturing of the church is most threatening, Paul lays out a key insight into the church’s union with Christ—the Spirit of adoption. For Paul, adoption isn’t simply one more literary image to convey “Jesus in my heart.” It has everything to do with our identity and our inheritance in Christ.

Maria and I went to Russia and back, twice, to accomplish a task, to complete a long paper trail that would bring us to the legal custody of our sons. Along with that, however, it jolted us with the truth of an adoption more ancient, more veiled, but just as real: our own.

Our Adopted Identity

When Maria and I first walked into the orphanage, where we were led to the boys the Russian courts had picked out for us to adopt, we almost vomited in reaction to the stench and squalor of the place. The boys were in cribs, in the dark, lying in their own waste.

Leaving them at the end of each day was painful, but leaving them the final day, before going home to wait for the paperwork to go through, was the hardest thing either of us had ever done. Walking out of the room to prepare for the plane ride home, Maria and I could hear Maxim calling out for us and falling down in his crib, convulsing in tears. Maria shook with tears of her own. I turned around to walk back into their room, just for a minute.

I placed my hand on both of their heads and said, knowing they couldn’t understand a word of English, “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.” I don’t think I consciously intended to cite Jesus’s words to his disciples in John 14:18; it just seemed like the only thing worth saying at the time.

For us, it didn’t matter that they seemed like any other orphan in that institution; they were part of our family now. We knew them. We loved them. We claimed them. And it didn’t matter that for the next several weeks they’d still be called “Maxim” and “Sergei.” The nameplates hanging on the wall of their new room in a faraway country read “Benjamin” and “Timothy.”

In one sense, my sons’ situation was quite unique. In another sense, though, their lives marked from the very beginning the kind of ambiguity that often comes along with adoption. Sometimes people will speak of children who’ve been adopted as prone to having an “identity crisis” at some point in their lives. This isn’t the case for every child, of course, but it does seem that many children who were adopted find themselves asking at some point, “Who am I?” The Bible reveals, though, that this kind of crisis of identity isn’t limited to children who’ve been adopted. All of us are looking to discover who we really are, whether we were born into loving homes or abandoned at orphanage doors, whether we were born into stable families or born, like our Lord, in a stable.

I guess that’s what bothered me so much about the “Are they brothers?” question. There was almost a note of implied pity—as though, if they were biologically brothers, well, then at least they’d have each other. The query seemed to be asking, “Is this a real family or just a legal fiction?” The question seemed to render them orphans again.

That question isn’t new.

In his letter to the church at Rome, the apostle Paul raises the issue of adoption, just as he does in similar letters to the churches at Galatia and Ephesus. But before he begins his discussion, he addresses the assembled congregation as “brothers” (Rom. 8:12). That’s a word that’s lost its meaning in our churches, I fear. We tend to view it as a mere spiritual metaphor for “friend” or “acquaintance.” Perhaps in your church, “brother” is a safe word you might use when you’ve forgotten someone’s name (“Hey, brother, how are you?”) or to soften some hurtful comment (“I can’t marry you, Johnny, but I love you . . . as a brother in Christ”).

The churches emerging out of Judaism in the first century, however, would have understood precisely how radical this “brothers” language is. The “sons of Israel” started out, after all, not as a government entity but as twelve brothers. Everywhere in the Old Testament the people of Israel are defined as “brothers” as opposed to “strangers” or “sojourners” (for example, Lev. 25:35–46; Deut. 17:15). That’s why Jesus’s hearers can’t get his references to “loving your neighbor” in his story about a Good Samaritan (Luke 10:27, 29). Their Bibles clearly refer to a “neighbor” as one’s fellow Israelite, a kinsman by blood, one of one’s people, one’s brother (Lev. 19:17–18).

It’s hard for us to get the force of the “brothers” language since almost none of us think of ourselves as “Gentiles.” That’s a safe, boring “Bible word.” We would never claim our identity around something as, well, private as whether we’ve been circumcised. We might think of ourselves as American or Australian, blue collar or white collar, Republican or Democrat, or any number of other things, but words like “Gentile” or “uncircumcised” seem very distant from our lives.

Imagine, though, that you live in a very different age, a land without electric lights or telecommunication. You’ve never been more than ten miles from your home. Your family doesn’t talk to you anymore, and you’ve lost your job. You got caught up in this foreign cult, one that teaches that this executed insurrectionist has come back from the dead. You’ll never forget your mother’s face when she asked you if it was true that you and your new friends eat human skin and drink human blood together in your meetings. You’ve walked away from all you’ve ever known.

And when you arrive at the house with the rest of your fellow Messiah followers, things get uncomfortable for you, again. One of the pastors reads those old words from one of the books of Moses. It talks about how “the uncircumcised” are “cut off” from the promises of God. You squirm a little bit in your seat. You know, should anyone bother to check, that you’d never pass for circumcised. No one’s ever offered to make the cut for you, and you kind of hope they don’t.

As a matter of fact, the more you think about it, every time people like you are mentioned in the book you believe is the Word of your God, it seems to always be pointing out that you’re “the other.” Sure, sometimes people like you are spoken of as “strangers and aliens” to be treated well. But most of the time you’re one of the villains of the story, with names like Goliath, Nebuchadnezzar, or Jezebel. People like you keep getting their heads cut off by the good guys in the story, or else they’re drowned by God himself. You’re what they call a “Gentile.” And your only hope in the world is a Jewish king, one nobody’s heard from in years and one that most of the Jews themselves don’t even recognize as the real thing.

If this were the scenario today, I can only imagine the way we’d de-emphasize those uncomfortable Old Testament texts in our public reading of Scripture, our preaching, our worship songs. I can imagine the kind of “recovering Philistines” support groups we might have if the gospel had first shown up in our culture rather than theirs. But the New Testament does no such thing. The apostolic gospel deals with the sordid past of the Gentiles who now claim Christ as their own, and it does so with jarring honesty.

These Gentiles are reminded that they are, by nature, pagans. Their background is a story of rebels turning from the God of creation to worshiping trees, rocks, and snakes and to carrying out all their twisted cravings (Rom. 1:16–2:16). They were “alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world” (Eph. 2:12). They followed after the demonic powers, “carrying out the desires of the body and the mind” (Eph. 2:3). They were “enslaved to those that by nature are not gods” (Gal. 4:8).

This must have seemed to some of the new Christ followers like your friend who reminds you every week that, yes, he’s the one who found you your current job and, why, yes, he’s the one who loaned you the money to pay for your college education and—yes, now that you mention it—he’s the one who introduced you to your spouse. I imagine if I had been in one of the earlier congregations, listening to these letters read to me, I might have been thinking something like, “If my old life is ‘crucified’ with Jesus, then why should I remember it? If the Gentiles are ‘children of promise’ (Gal. 2:20; 3:29) right along with the Jews, then why do you have to keep reminding us we’re Gentiles? If ‘neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision’ (Gal. 6:15), then why do you keep bringing it up?”

But the flight from one’s old identity is part of the gospel itself. That’s what repentance is, which is why the adoption passages of the New Testament spend so much time warning against finding one’s identity in “the flesh” (Romans 8). Now, “the flesh,” for Paul, isn’t the body. It is instead one’s creaturely aspect considered apart from the direction of God’s Spirit. It’s the old order, that old pattern of confidence in one’s self, the refusal to see oneself as a creature in need of lordship. That’s ultimately a question of identity. Am I the sum total of my biological background, of my biological urges, or of the markings made in my skin by my parents?

This question of identity is why Paul warns so strongly about “walking according to the flesh” rather than the Spirit, about returning to patterns that were left behind. One’s “flesh” shows who one’s father is—and that’s terrifying. When we “bite and devour one another” (Gal. 5:15), we’re imaging one who seeks “someone to devour” (1 Pet. 5:8), not the One who came to seek and save that which was lost.

Imagine for a moment that you’re adopting a child. As you meet with the social worker in the last stage of the process, you’re told that this twelve-year-old has been in and out of psychotherapy since he was three. He persists in burning things and attempting repeatedly to skin kittens alive. He “acts out sexually,” the social worker says, although she doesn’t really fill you in on what that means. She continues with a little family history. This boy’s father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather all had histories of violence, ranging from spousal abuse to serial murder. Each of them ended life the same way, death by suicide—each found hanging from a rope of blankets in his respective prison cell.

Think for a minute. Would you want this child? If you did adopt him, wouldn’t you keep your eye on him as he played with your other children? Would you watch him nervously as he looks at the butcher knife on the kitchen table? Would you leave the room as he watched a movie on television with your daughter, with the lights out?

Well, he’s you. And he’s me. That’s what the gospel is telling us. Our birth father has fangs. And left to ourselves, we’ll show ourselves to be as serpentine as he is.

That’s why our sin ought to disturb us. The “works of the flesh” (Gal. 5:19)—jealousy, envy, wrath, lust, hatred, and on and on—ought to alarm us the way a tightness in the chest would alarm a man whose father and grandfather had dropped dead at the age of forty of heart disease. It ought to scare us like forgetting the next-door neighbor’s name would scare a woman whose mother was institutionalized on her thirty-fifth birthday for dementia. It’s easy to deceive ourselves though. The chest pains? They’re just indigestion. The forgetfulness? It’s just because of a hectic schedule. Even this self-deceit shows us our similarity to our reptilian birth father. He, after all, “knows that his time is short” but rages away against God and his Christ anyway (Rev. 12:12).

But the New Testament addresses former Satan imagers with good news. It’s not just that we have a stay of execution, a suspension of doom. It’s not simply that those who trust in Christ have found a refuge, a safe place, or a foster home. All those in Christ, Paul argues, have received sonship. We are now “Abraham’s offspring” (Gal. 3:29). Within this household—the tribal family of Abraham—all those who are in Christ have found a home through the adopting power of God.

The New Testament reminds those of us who are newcomers of our adoption so we’ll remember that we are here by the Spirit, not by the exertions of our flesh. Because we’ve been brought into an already-existing family, we ought not to be proud, as though we were here by family entitlement (Rom. 11:11–25). We’re here by grace.

But our adoption also shows us just how welcome we are here. This is not, after all, the first time God has adopted. Too often we assume that the Gentiles are the “adopted” children of God, and the Jews are the “natural-born” children. But Paul says that Israel was adopted too (Rom. 9:4). Of Israel, God once said, “Your origin and your birth are of the land of the Canaanites; your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite” (Ezek. 16:3). The Israelites were once Gentiles too. God reminds Israel that he “found him in a desert land, and in the howling waste of the wilderness” (Deut. 32:10). Israel was an abandoned baby, wallowing in its own blood on the roadside (Ezek. 16:5).

That’s why Paul seems so furious at the idea that Gentiles would be forced to undergo circumcision. Circumcision answers the question, “Are you a part of the family? Are the promises made to you? Are you in the covenant?” The Jewish believers who prize circumcision want to see themselves, and others, apart from Christ. It’s a lack of faith, a lack of repentance. If they are clinging to their identity in Christ, being found in him, then everything else is “rubbish” (Phil. 3:8–9). Yes, we’re part of the family, but we don’t point to our own circumcised flesh to prove that; we point away from ourselves and to a circumcised, law-keeping, faithful, resurrected Messiah (Col. 2:11–13). And the Jewish leaders who insist on circumcision for Gentile believers are looking under the wrong robe.

The promise has dawned, and our identity is now found in him. All of us—whatever our background—have been liberated from the old order (Gal. 4:1–5) and from “the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear” (Rom. 8:15). We now come before God as sons bearing the very same Spirit as was poured out on the Lord Jesus at the Jordan River, a Spirit through which we cry, “Abba!” (Rom. 8:15).

This means repentance. We recognize and know that we never could have found ourselves in this family through “the flesh” (Romans 8)—whether that striving was through biblical circumcision or through pagan orgies or through modern self-absorption. Our identity is found in another—Jesus of Nazareth.

The “Are they brothers?” question irritated me so much, the more I thought about it, because it was about more than my adoption process. It was about my pride and self-delusion. It reminded me of my own tendency to prize my carnality, a tendency the Scripture warns leads right to the grave (Rom. 8:13). None of us likes to think we were adopted. We assume we’re natural-born children, with a right to all of this grace, to all of this glory.

We think, Paul warns us right before he tells us of our adoption, that we are debtors to the flesh, so we “live according to the flesh” (Rom. 8:12). We’re ashamed to think of ourselves as adopted, because to do so would focus our minds on the gory truth that all of us in Christ, like my sons, once were lost but now we’re found, once were strangers and now we’re children, once were slaves and now we’re heirs.

And yet, even the flesh and blood we share—not just with our children but with all of humanity—has everything to do with our adoption. Jesus, after all, shares in human “flesh and blood” so that he might deliver those who “through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery” (Heb. 2:14–15). Jesus took on everything—from blushing skin to sweating pores to firing adrenal glands to moving bowels—all because he “had to be made like his brothers in every respect” (Heb. 2:17). And, speaking of us, our Lord Jesus, the only One with the natural-born right to cry, “Abba!” “is not ashamed to call them brothers” (Heb. 2:11).

According to the apostle John, the religious leaders of Jesus’s day were quite sure of their biological pedigree. They could trace it back to Abraham. If called upon, they could pull up their robes and prove their place in the community with a mark in their skin. They had no shady parental background as they thought Jesus to have (John 8:39– 41). Jesus, however, identified their birth father as Satan and their inheritance as that of a slave (John 8:34–38).

But John ends his Gospel with a more hopeful sound. Jesus’s first words as a resurrected man weren’t about philosophy or theology or predictions about the end of the age. Instead, his first words included a message to Mary to go “to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’” (John 20:17).

Think about these words for a moment. They’re being formed by a tongue and teeth that, just hours before, were dead tissue in a hole in the Middle East. If you could catch even a hint of how awe-filled these words are, you’d drop this book right now—and I’d stop typing it—and we’d both fall to our knees in tears.

Remember—these men he calls “brothers” were at that very moment sniveling cowards at best and insurrectionists at worst. They were hiding in a room somewhere, listening for the sound of soldiers’ feet. They’d walked away from Christ and him crucified. They were ashamed of the gospel. But he wasn’t ashamed of them.

John wasn’t “really” Jesus’s brother, was he? But he shares a mother with him, in that Jesus “adopts” him into the family at the cross, commissioning him to do what a family member is to do—to care for a mother in distress (John 19:26–27).

And these unfaithful and fearful disciples, quick to go back to the fisherman’s nets they had when he found them, had no reason to approach a holy Creator, no reason to call him “our God.” But they—and we—are Jesus’s brothers, and so the Father is our God. He is not ashamed.

But that’s hard to believe.

The New Testament continually points to our adoption in Christ in order to show us that we’re really, really wanted here in the Father’s house. The Spirit is continually telling the people of Christ that they, we, are “blessed” in Christ through adoption (Eph. 1:3, 5). We are all Abraham’s children because Jesus is (Gal. 3:28–29). Perhaps we were “at one time” Gentiles, but we aren’t part of the uncircumcised order anymore (Eph. 2:11). We are now all “fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God” (Eph. 2:19). We are to exchange our “old self” for the “new self, created after the likeness of God” (Eph. 4:22–24). We are now brothers (Rom. 8:12).

The Gentile Christians in the early churches must have wondered what they were doing, following after this Jewish king from somebody else’s religion. Had they wandered accidentally into somebody else’s covenant? Were they clinging to some kind of “exception clause” to God’s main purpose with Israel? Were they parasites on the promises of God?

Some of the Jewish believers, those with consciences sensitive enough to see how uncircumcised their hearts could be too, must have wondered something similar.

Don’t you know what that feels like too, to wonder if you’re an accidental visitor awkwardly standing in the corner of a party to which you’ve not been invited? What if our whole lives are like that? What if we’re in the kind of situation described by humorist Jack Handey when he writes, “The crows seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw”?1

This fear is exactly why the New Testament ties our adoption to God’s purpose in election. We were known beforehand, the Bible says, predestined “to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers” (Rom. 8:29). “In love,” the text says, “he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ” (Eph. 1:4–5). Paul tells us that we have not only “come to know God” but rather that we have come “to be known by God” (Gal. 4:9).

Now I realize that the mention of words like election and predestination are making some of you tense up right now, and I understand why. But it’s really not a scary concept. All Christians believe in election and predestination—these are Bible words, after all.

We sometimes disagree about how God’s purpose fits with other things the Bible reveals—that God loves all people and wants to see all people come to Christ, that God is impartial, that human beings make free choices for which they’re held personally responsible. We often have different opinions about the finer points of this mystery, and we can live together with some tension here.

It’s important to know that nothing about the biblical doctrine of election is meant to cast doubt on whether you’re welcome in God’s household. God is not some metaphysical airport security screener, waving through the secretly preapproved and sending the rest into a holding tank for questioning. God isn’t treating us like puppets made of meat, forcing us along by his capricious whim.

Instead, the doctrine of election tells us that all of us who have come to know Christ are here on purpose. God was looking for us. He rejoices in us. And he cries out, “I was ready to be sought by those who did not ask for me; I was ready to be found by those who did not seek me. I said, ‘Here I am, here I am,’ to a nation that was not called by my name” (Isa. 65:1). That’s all of us, you and me. There’s freedom in that, and a liberating sense of belonging.

How do you know if you’re part of this household? The Spirit of God is there.

The Spirit, after all, is the One in the Old Testament who marks out who the king is, the anointed one, called by God his “son.” That’s how you know that David is king and Saul isn’t anymore. It’s not by the royal entourage or the title or the office. Saul has all of these for a long time after he’s rejected as king. It’s the presence of the Spirit on David, a Spirit who empowers him to behead giants and sing songs of praise (1 Samuel 16–30). The Spirit also marks out who Israel is, the children of promise, raising them from the dead and announcing them as the heirs of God (Ezek. 37:13–14).

When “the flesh” can’t reproduce a deliverer for the human race, the Spirit overshadows a virgin’s uterus and conceives a new humanity (Luke 1:35). The Spirit descends on Jesus at his baptism, as God’s voice proclaims his acceptance of his “beloved Son” (Matt. 3:17). When Jesus is raised from the dead by the power of the Spirit, God declares him “to be the Son of God in power” (Rom. 1:4). If you’re united to Christ, then that same Spirit now rests on you (1 Pet. 4:14). You share in his anointing (1 John 2:20, 26–27). To have the Spirit doesn’t necessarily mean that you “feel” especially spiritual. It just means you agree with God that Jesus is Lord and that that’s good news (1 Cor. 12:3). And it means you agree with Jesus that our Father is in heaven and we can trust him (Matt. 6:9).

“The Spirit himself,” Paul tells the Romans, “bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (Rom. 8:16). This isn’t some giddy, emotional experience—a comforting whisper in our consciences that we’re of Christ. The Spirit simply points us to Jesus and identifies us with him. Because we share the Spirit with Jesus, we cry out with him to the same Father (Rom. 8:15; Gal. 4:6). And since what unites us to Jesus is his Spirit, not our flesh, we share a common family with all those who also have this Spirit resting upon them. Since there’s one Spirit, there’s “one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all” (Eph. 4:5–6).

That’s adoption. We’re part of a brand-new family, a new tribe, with a new story, a new identity.

As Maria and I went through the adoption process, we were encouraged by everyone from social workers to family friends to “teach the children about their cultural heritage.” We have done just that.

Now, what most people probably meant by this counsel is for us to teach our boys Russian folk tales and Russian songs, observing Russian holidays, and so forth. But as we see it, that’s not their heritage anymore, and we hardly want to signal to them that they are strangers and aliens, even welcome ones, in our home. We teach them about their heritage, yes, but their heritage as Mississippians. They hear, then, about their great-grandfather, a faithful Baptist pastor from Tippah County. I tell them how the deacons at his church would give his paycheck to my grandmother because they were afraid he’d give it all away to the poor in his flock. They learn about their great-great-grandfather who worked hard raising cotton but couldn’t overcome his drinking. They learn about their people before them in the Confederate army and the civil rights movement.

Yes, I’ll read Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy to them one day, I suppose, but not with the same intensity with which I’ll read to them William Faulkner and Eudora Welty. They wouldn’t know an arrangement of “Peter and the Wolf” if they heard it, but they can recognize the voices of Charley Pride and Hank Williams in seconds. When we sit at the table for our holiday meals, they don’t eat borscht. They eat what we eat—red beans and rice or fried catfish or shrimp risotto. They share our lives, and our story. They belong here. They are Moores now, with all that entails.

Now you might assume that this means that we would want to obliterate our sons’ Russian identity and assume it into ours. Not at all. That’s not how adoption works, on the spiritual or familial planes. They are part of our story, yes, but this also means that we are part of theirs.

When he was small, Benjamin worked on a paper for school on the life of Abraham Lincoln. He recited off for me what he had written. “Abraham Lincoln was a great man.”

I said, “Right.”

“Abraham Lincoln was president of the United States.”

I said, “Right again.”

“Abraham Lincoln was one of the greatest presidents ever.”

I said, “Certainly true.”

“Everyone loved Abraham Lincoln and did whatever he said.”

I said, “Um, that’s not really historically accurate.”

Benjamin asked what I meant, and I said, “Well, there was a war . . .” After I explained the Civil War to him for a few minutes, Benjamin said, “Who on earth would go to war against Abraham Lincoln?”

I blushed and stammered and said, “Well, unfortunately, my ancestors went to war against Abraham Lincoln.”

He asked why, and I blushed with shame even more as I explained the evils of slavery.

“Dad, that’s sick,” he said, with judgment in his voice. “Slavery is wrong.”

“I know,” I said. “They were wrong, and sinful, in propping up a system like that.”

“Dad, I can’t believe that you have relatives who would’ve thought that way,” he said.

I said, “Hey, let’s talk about the czars, and Stalin, for a while. We all have some skeletons in these genealogical closets.”

The truth is, the story of the czars and the Soviet Union is now part of my story too. Maria and I didn’t simply go to Russia and return with two children, we joined ourselves to Russia. It’s not just that Ben and Timothy are now Americans; we are, as a family, in a very real sense, Russian. When I meet someone from the Rostov region of Russia, I light up with familiarity just as I do when I meet someone from the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. I immediately ask them about whether they know the little mining community where our boys were born. It’s where I’m from now too.

When events affecting Russia happen, we all pay attention more than we would simply out of geopolitical concern. Two of us are Russian by birth; the rest of us are Russian by adoption. When Ben and Timothy came into our home, the rest of us were tied, inextricably, with what the apostle Paul would call our “kinsmen according to the flesh” (Rom. 9:3).

The New Testament so repeatedly points all of us toward the Old Testament narratives, which are given, as Paul tells the church at Corinth, “as examples for us” (1 Cor. 10:6). It’s not just that these accounts show us something universal about human nature and God’s workings. It is that they are our story, our heritage, our identity.

Those are our ancestors rescued from Egypt, wandering in the wilderness, led back from exile. They are our forefathers, and this is our family. Whether our background is Norwegian or Haitian or Indonesian, if we are united to Christ, our family genealogy is found not primarily in the front pages of our dusty old family Bible but inside its pages, in the first chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. Our identity is in Christ, so his people are our people, his God our God.

We know the first Christians were persecuted. What we often don’t think about is how lonely many of them must have been. Many of them would have been told by their parents, their siblings, their spouses, and their villages not to speak to them again until they pulled themselves out of this fishermen’s cult. The Spirit of adoption didn’t just wrench them away from their family ties. He gave them new ones. The Messiah they followed told them that those who leave behind “houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life” (Matt. 19:29). Through adoption into Christ, the word brother really means something.