Spiritual Adoption

Every year at the Super Bowl advertisers pay millions of dollars to advertise their product for a few short minutes. And they have a contest after the Super Bowl which company the viewers like the best.

Some of these ads are fascinating.

Did you know some of these ads are so good that years have gone by and we still remember them. Such as:

• Burger King “Have it your way”.

• Wendy’s “Where’s the beef”

• Federal Express vowed to deliver "Absolutely, Positively Overnight."

• How many of us can ever forget this campaign that ran for two decades. “Plop plop, fizz fizz, oh what a relief it is,” (Alka Seltzer)

• American Express from 1987-1996. Their slogan “Membership has its privileges”

• Or this older jingle,

“Pepsi - Cola hits the spot.

12 full ounces, that's a lot!

Twice as much for a nickel, too.

Pepsi-Cola is the drink for you!

These commercials have lodge themselves into our memory banks, I guess many of us will remember them until the day we die.

But there are things in the scriptures we need to have lodge into our memory banks as well and remember them until the day we die.

Such as…

I. OUR ADOPTION

Look at Ephesians 1:5, we read, Having predestinated us unto the ADOPTION of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will,

There are thousands of boys and girls that are waiting and hoping to be adopted by some family that would love them and care for them.

Illus: Author Keith Miller tells of an outgoing 40-year-old woman who was part of a sharing group he led. Here is her story:

"When I was a tiny little girl, my parents died and I was put in an orphanage. I was not pretty at all and no one seemed to want me. But I longed to be adopted and loved by a family as far back as I can remember. I thought about it day and night, but everything I did seemed to go wrong. I must have tried too hard to please the people who came to look me over and what I did was to drive them away.

"But then one day the head of the orphanage told me that a family was coming to take me home with them. I was so excited that I jumped up and down and cried like a little baby.

The matron reminded me that I was on trial and this might not be a permanent arrangement, but I just knew that somehow it would work out.

"So I went with this family and started to school. I was the happiest little girl you can imagine, and life began to open up for me just a little. But then one day a few months later, I skipped home from school and ran into the front door of the big old house we lived in. No one was at home, but in the middle of the front hall was my battered suitcase with my little coat thrown across it. As I stood there it suddenly dawned on me what it meant---I didn’t belong there anymore."

This happened to me seven times before I was 13 years old. But wait, don’t feel too badly. It was experiences like these that ultimately brought me to God---and there I found what I had always longed for---a place, a sense of belonging, a forever family."(Source: From a sermon by Bruce Howell, "The Essence!" 2/21/2009)

Physically you might be the ugliest person in the world and still God loves you

What a joy for us Christians that we have been adopted by God the Father. AND OUR ADOPTION IS PERMANENT.

And now we have God the Creator as our HEAVENLY FATHER!!!

Illus: When pastor James Kennedy’s daughter Jennifer was about five years of age she picked up the habit of calling her parents ‘Anne’ and ‘Jim’. She heard all their friends come into the house and address them like that, and so she did the same.

After a few weeks of this Jim sat her on his knee and he said to her, “Jennifer, do you know that there are thousands of people in the world who can call me Jim, but there is no other person in the whole world who can call me ‘Daddy’ except you, and to you, alone, my dear Jennifer, my name is . . . Daddy!”

So it is with us Christians: while being chosen by him is a wonderful blessing, even more wonderful is that he has predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ.

We can look into this God’s wonderful smiling face and we can cry “Abba, Father.”

When the Lord Jesus taught his own disciples to pray he said that they were to say, “Our Father which art in heaven . . .” So adoption is not the same blessing as election.