Translating Your PastSample

I’m chosen?

Many families are created through adoption. Although there is no central clearinghouse for adoption statistics, current estimates suggest that 2 percent of children in the United States are adopted via private domestic or international adoption or out of the foster care system—about 1.8 million children. Those numbers don’t include stepparent adoptions or informal caretaking arrangements created within extended families.

Adoption is an important way to understand how God speaks about the family of faith. Although the Old Testament never uses the word adoption, God’s work in creating new families for his redemptive purposes is seen throughout its narrative.

For instance, God chose the aging Abram to leave his family and become the patriarch of an entirely new nation that would be devoted to God’s service. Moses’s mother, in a desperate attempt to save his life, entrusted her child to God by placing him in a tar-coated basket in the reeds along the Nile. In effect, Pharaoh’s daughter became the baby’s foster mother. The book of Ruth opens with the account of a young Moabite woman who refused to return to her home village after her husband died, clinging instead to her Hebrew mother-in-law Naomi and insisting that Naomi’s people were her true family, and Naomi’s God was now her God. Ruth’s great-grandson King David wrote the words we read today in Psalm 68:5–6.

The New Testament uses the language of adoption, which was a part of Roman culture in the first century, to highlight the kind of family Jesus was creating out of Jews and Gentiles alike. The apostle Paul uses the Greek word for “adoption” (huiothesia, which means “to place as a son”) five times in the New Testament to highlight the relationship God wants with each one of us.

Whether we grew up with our birth parents or in clans formed from adoption, there is a deeply profound truth that is intertwined with the story of our human family: God chose you to be his beloved child. Through faith in the Son, you belong to God.

Pray: Father, I confess that I don’t fully understand all that it means to be your adopted child, but I want to grow in understanding and live in the confidence of this reality. Thank you for welcoming me to your family and telling me I belong to you.