Quotes from Adopted For Life

J.D. Greear posts some quotes from Adopted For Life:

• “Whether our background is Norwegian, Hatian and 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.” (37)
• 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? (20)
• The protection of children isn’t charity. It isn’t part of a political program fitting somewhere between tax cuts and gun rights or between carbon emission caps and a national service corps. It’s spiritual warfare. (65)
• What better way is there to bring the good news of Christ than to see his unwanted little brothers and sisters placed in families where they’ll be raised in the nurture and admonition of the Lord? (75)
• Think of how revolutionary it is for a Christian to adopt a young boy with a cleft palate from a region of India where most people see him as “defective”. Think of how counterintuitive it is for Christians to adopt a Chinese girl – when many there see her as a disappointment. Think of how odd it must seem to American secularists to see Christians adopting a baby whose body trembles with an addiction to the cocaine her mother sent through her bloodstream before birth. Think of the kind of credibility such action lends to the proclamation of our gospel. (79)
• Without the theological (dimensions on adoption), an emphasis on it would too easily is seen as mere charity. Without the missional aspect, the doctrine of adoption too easily is seen as mere metaphor. (18)
• (In response to rude questions people ask him about whether the kids are really "his"): “Our adoption is about the day when…the great assembly of Christ’s church will be gathered before the Judgement Seat. On that day, the accusing principalities and powers will probably look once more at us – former murderers and fornicators and idolators, formerly uncircumcised in flesh or in heart – and they maybe ask one more time, “So are they brothers?” The hope of adopted children like my sons – and like me – is that the voice that once thundered over the Jordan will respond, one last time, “They are now.” (57)