Tag Archives: adoption

A Person’s a Person

March 12, 2012 By in Cultural Issues Tags: , , , , 4 Comments

By Jon and David Wooten (with apologies to Dr. Seuss and to the regulative principle)

Note: this poem was delivered as an announcement on Sunday morning to promote the TLC Walk for Life.

A person’s a person, no matter how small.
No matter how short and no matter how tall.
True Life Choice cares for women, you see,
Who find themselves now in a pregnancy.
They love and they care and they pray with these people,
Many of whom have never been under a steeple.
They give women resources and tell them their options:
To give life to their child, and to parent or choose adoption.
Some women who come to True Life are abortion-minded,
So I’m here this morning that we might be reminded:

There are certain people, so I’ve been told
Who get no recognition
And these people, if I’m so bold,
Are in quite a tight position.
They can’t say a word, not even a tittle.
They can’t fight for themselves because they’re so little.
They’re unborn babies, and they need your assistance.
They’re up against a bad, mean resistance.
They’re under attack because they’re unborn and labeled a burden.
Some don’t see they’re special, and like them, a person.
We all need to realize God created them all
For a person’s a person, no matter how small.

OGC works with True Life in a wonderful tradition.
On March 24th we’ll take a grand expedition.
Around Lake Eola we will Walk for Life,
And walk we will with all of our might.
You can sponsor a walker or come walk yourself.
Lace up those sneakers sitting up on that shelf.
Bring the whole family: mom, dad, brothers, sisters.
We’ll all walk for life: kids, ladies and misters.
Parents can walk while toddlers toddle.
Strollers can stroll while we strut, jog and waddle.

For the church who gets the most walkers, you see,
There’s a prize! Oh, a prize with a great legacy.
The Sneaker of Silver could be our award!
A treasure so grand, no church could afford.

Now I urge you, my friend, to stand up to the task.
If you want to know more, then come find me and ask.
Sign up at the table as you leave here today.
My announcement is done. Now I’ll just go away,
But not without saying once more to you all
That a person’s a person, no matter how small.

Sanctity of Life & Population Control

January 14, 2012 By in Sunday Morning Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

Tomorrow is Sanctity of Human Life Sunday. I have given over the pulpit to David Wooten, my friend, new member at OGC, and staff member at Embrace By Grace, a Christian adoption ministry in Casselberry. I look forward to what my brother will bring from the word in Genesis tomorrow on the subject of being made in the image of God.

I find it a bit ironic that Sanctity of Human Life Sunday, always the third Sunday of January from year to year, coincides with my neighborhood book club on Monday where we will discuss Peter Hessler’s intriguing work River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze. The book documents Hessler’s two year stint with the Peace Corps in the city of Fuling, China, teaching English in the local university. The book started slow for me but gradually picked up with the author’s descriptive abilities in writing and the various subjects upon which he touched.

Among them in China, of course, was the matter of the government policy prohibiting the citizens from having more than one child. To exceed that limit, according to Hessler, invites stiff consequences of various kinds. He writes:

The going rate for a second child was More than ten thousand yuan, at least in the countryside close to the college. In the city it was rare that anybody got to the point where she paid this fine–if a woman was pregnant with her second child, she would be threatened with the loss of her job. . . . and having a second child could result in a woman’s being forced to undergo sterilization surgery (p. 261).

Knowing the bent of some of my neighbors, I anticipate that this subject will come up in our discussion. In the interest of preparing for the conversation, I did a bit of research on the question of population control and came across this excellent article entitled, Population Growth as Blessing or Blight. In it E. Calvin Beisner dismisses some of the emotional rhetoric surrounding the controversy with statistical evaluation, biblical exegesis, and sound ethical argumentation. For example, he contends:

People are not machines; they cannot be programmed and expected to behave as ordered. They have imagination, hopes and fears, emotions, volitions, and goals. These and many other determinants of human action change relative to a constantly changing environment. Begetting and bearing babies are human actions, and like all other human actions they are determined by humans’ constantly changing hopes, fears, goals, and choices. In a world in which so many things change so rapidly, it is intellectual suicide for anyone to pretend to predict with accuracy and reliability what large numbers of people will do over long periods of time.

To read the entire article click here.

Tomorrow as we gather for worship on the Lord’s Day may we celebrate the God who made us in Him image AND told us to be fruitful and multiply WITHOUT entertaining fears that somehow obeying God will jeopardize the planet. It never has been the case and never will be.

Two Complimentary Registrations

November 2, 2010 By in conferences Tags: , , , 1 Comment

Through my connections with the Florida Chapter of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, I have access to two complimentary registrations for this weekend’s conference on adoption in Lake Mary.

For a detailed look at the conference click on here.

The description on the site is as follows:

We will hear gifted men exposit the Scriptures concerning how you, your family, and your local church, can embrace this life-changing truth in very practical ways. The speakers will trace the love of God to the adoption of His children. They will also bring out how that love should motivate us to care for the needs of children that do not have loving parents or a family.  These teachings on the comfort and hope of adoption will warm your heart and deepen your understanding of what it means to be a part of God’s forever family. Your appreciation for the Christian family and the church will grow as you discover how these divine institutions meet very real needs in practical ways.

Registration included entry, meals, and a concert by Andrew Peterson on Friday night!

If you would like to know the coupon code to use for registration, email me at revheff@gmail.com and I will be happy to share it with you, first come/first served.

Adopted4Ever Conference

September 27, 2010 By in conferences Tags: , , 2 Comments

A few weeks ago David Wooten of Embraced By Grace ministries joined us to tell us about this event in Lake Mary on Nov. 5 & 6 at the Westin Lake Mary that will focus on adoption from two directions – vertical in terms of our relationship with God and horizontal in terms of the ministry of adopting orphans into our Christian families.

Here is a portion of the description for the conference web link:

We will hear gifted men exposit the Scriptures concerning how you, your family, and your local church, can embrace this life-changing truth in very practical ways. The speakers will trace the love of God to the adoption of His children. They will also bring out how that love should motivate us to care for the needs of children that do not have loving parents or a family.  These teachings on the comfort and hope of adoption will warm your heart and deepen your understanding of what it means to be a part of God’s forever family. Your appreciation for the Christian family and the church will grow as you discover how these divine institutions meet very real needs in practical ways.

Early registration of only $59 ends this Thursday, September 30, and includes two meals AND a special concert by Andrew Peterson.

If you want to learn more about this doctrine of Scripture that John Owen called the fountain privilege of the gospel and/or find out more information about adopting children into your own family, this conference is for you.

More Review of Our Fountain Privilege

January 4, 2010 By in Exposition Tags: , , Leave a comment

Yesterday’s message on the biblical docrtrine of adoption from 1 John 3:1a can be summed up like this:

The reality of our status as those born of God and thus belonging to Him as children in His family is owed entirely to the love He as our Father has bestowed upon us. With that love, an alien love in that it is other-worldly, there is a glory to be surveyed, a gift to be savored, and a grid to be secured.

When I blogged last night’s follow up post to the message, my wife asked me to review the five parts of point three, the grid to be secured. Seems I flew through them quite fast! Here is that section from my manuscript in case you may have missed some of those items as well. 

He wants this grid, this way of thinking about ourselves, absolutely, positively secure. He wants us flabbergasted at the wonder/glory of the alien love behind it, like the prodigal in Luke 15:20, smothered by his father’s love upon his return from the pigsty.

He wants us anchored in a guaranteed certainty in hope of the future that with our adoption as children comes a promised inheritance of unspeakable eternal wealth (Romans 8:16-17).

He wants us solidified in our understanding that the ministry of the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of adoption (Rom. 8:15; Gal. 4:6) serves to make us realize with increasing clarity the meaning of our filial relationship with God in Christ, and to lead us into an ever deeper response to God in this relationship (Packer, Knowing God, p. 220).

He wants us sobered and gripped by implications of our adoption for our growth in Gospel holiness because as sons and daughters loved by God He disciplines us in order to produce a harvest of righteousness in us as ones so trained by that discipline (Heb. 12:6-11).

 He wants us comforted, encouraged and strengthened in the assurance of our salvation knowing that the Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children and that if children, then we are heirs (Rom. 8:16-17).

That, dear ones, is a grid. It’s biblical. It’s yours as adopted children of God. May it be secure as secure can be. Nothing matters more to your spiritual growth in 2010!

May the Holy Spirit work deeply in us this year to walk in the complete security of this oh so precious grid!

Adoption – Our Fountain Privilege

January 3, 2010 By in Exposition, Personal Reflection Tags: , 5 Comments

I worked hard this morning in my message to persuade that adoption is the highest privilege afforded by the gospel.

It might be easier for me than some to embrace that, since I am an adopted son in the earthly realm.

I mentioned today that Nancy and I spent yesterday with my extended family to celebrate my mother’s 80th birthday. That’s her along side my stepdad.

I never stop marveling at the alien love that causes a man to make someone else’s child his son and heir. See what kind of love is this!

If you still need convincing on this idea of the uniqueness of adoption as a gospel blessing, Wayne Grudem offers his take in his systematic theology:

God could have given us justification without the privileges of adoption into his family, for he could have forgiven our sins and given us right legal standing before him without making us his children. It is important to realize this because it helps us to recognize how great are our privileges in adoption. Regeneration has to do with our spiritual life within. Justification has to do with our standing before God’s law. But adoption has to do with our relationship with God as our Father, and in adoption we are given many of the greatest blessings that we will know for all eternity. When we begin to realize the excellence of these blessings, and when we appreciate that God has no obligation to give us any of them, then we will be able to exclaim with the apostle John, “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are” (1 John 3:1).

It’s true. It’s really true. We are beloved children of our heavenly Father. See it. Savor it. Secure it by faith.

More on Adoption – Not a Fairy Tale

November 22, 2009 By in Books Tags: , , , 2 Comments

Earlier this week I made a post quoting from J. I. Packer regarding the doctrine of adoption and the way we are loved by God as sons because of being in Christ through faith.

God receives us as sons, and loves us with the same steadfast affection with which he eternally loves his beloved only-begotten. There are no distinctions of affection in the divine family. We are all loved just as fully as Jesus is loved. It is like a fairy story–the reigning monarch adopts waifs and strays to make princes of them. But, praise God, it is not a fairy story: it is hard and solid fact, founded on the bedrock of free and sovereign grace. This, and nothing less than this, is what adoption means. No wonder John cries, “Behold what manner of love!” When once you understand adoption, your heart will cry the same (Knowing God, IVP, 1993, p. 216).

This morning in our Oxford Club for men we raised the question as to whether or not Dr. Packer might overstate the case a bit when he writes, There are no distinctions of affection in the divine family. Is there no difference at all between the affection shared by the Father and His Son within the Godhead in comparison with the affection we enjoy as sons through adoption?

John Frame speaks to the question in his book Salvation Belongs to the Lord:

Jesus Himself is the Son of God . . . . He has a unique sonship, a relation to God that we cannot attain. His sonship is higher than ours, and it is the source of ours, for it is only those who receive Christ (John 1:12) who gain the authority to be sons of God. In John 20:17 Jesus distinguishes his sonship from ours when he says to Mary, “Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’ Jesus never describes God as “our” Father in a way that equalizes the relationship between Jesus’ sonship and ours. Nevertheless, we are sons of God because God sees us in Christ, in his beloved Son. So, we share the blessings that the Father gives to his unique Son, Jesus (P&R, 2006, p. 206).

Of course this clarification takes nothing away from the astounding truth that God loves us as sons through the association we share with Jesus, our Brother. But it does help to recalibrate our thinking to remember the ultimately unique and ultimate sonship of the second person of the Trinity in relation to the first.

The recalibration notwithstanding, the immedidate message to our hearts from a consideration of adoption, as Dr. Packer reminds us (and I doubt Dr. Frame would disagree) remains the same. I am a child of God. God is my Father; heaven is my home; every day is one day nearer. My Savior is my brother; every Christian is my brother too (p. 228).

May we preach this message to our hearts every day and multiple times throughout the day until we finally go home to our reward and inherit the fullness of all our adoption secures for us in Christ Jesus. Then we will no longer need to preach these truths to our hearts for then we shall see Him as He and be like Him. Even so come quickly Lord Jesus.

Adoption – Not a Fairy Tale

November 19, 2009 By in Books Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

John Owen, the Puritan divine, called the biblical doctrine of adoption “our fountain privilege.” J. I. Packer calls it the highest privilege the gospel affords to those who believe.

The London Baptist 1689 Confession of Faith defines adoption this way:

FOR the sake of His only Son, Jesus Christ, God has been pleased to make all justified persons sharers in the grace of adoption, by means of which they are numbered with, and enjoy the liberties and privileges of children of God. Furthermore, God’s name is put upon them, they receive the spirit of adoption, and they are enabled to come boldly to the throne of grace and to cry ‘Abba, Father’. They are pitied, protected, provided for, and chastened by God as by a Father.He never casts them off, but, as they remain sealed to the day of redemption, they inherit the promises as heirs of everlasting salvation (Chap. 12).

Knowing GodIn Packer’s book Knowing God, he writes of what he calls deep insights from the Epistles of the New Testament that adoption gives us. First on the list is that our adoption shows us the greatness of God’s love. Indeed, the apostle John declares in 1 John 3:1, See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are.

The implications of this are staggering. More from Packer:

God receives us as sons, and loves us with the same steadfast affection with which he eternally loves his beloved only-begotten. There are no distinctions of affection in the divine family. We are all loved just as fully as Jesus is loved. It is like a fairy story–the reigning monarch adopts waifs and strays to make princes of them. But, praise God, it is not a fairy story: it is hard and solid fact, founded on the bedrock of free and sovereign grace. This, and nothing less than this, is what adoption means. No wonder John cries, “Behold what manner of love!” When once you understand adoption, your heart will cry the same (IVP, 1993, p. 216).

Men, do you want to understand adoption better? This Saturday at 7 AM at the church office Oxford Club meets. Bring your own breakfast and join in the discussion of chapter nineteen, Sons of God, in J. I. Packer’s Knowing God. May we all understand this precious doctrine better and actually believe that this is true: We are all loved just as fully as Jesus is loved!