One of my primary responsibilities at Carolina Hope is to explore and articulate the beautiful connection between uppercase Adoption (i.e. God's adoption of us) and lowercase adoption (i.e. our adoption of a child). We believe that the more we understand the ways in which these two forms of adoption are connected the more our experience of lowercase adoption will be enriched. J. I. Packer has written an excellent chapter (entitled "Sons of God") on uppercase adoption in his classic book Knowing God. Here is the first of several quotations from this chapter that I will post over the next few weeks:
"The establishing of the child's status as a member of the family is only a beginning. The real task remains: to establish a genuinely filial relationship between your adopted child and yourself. It is this, above all, that you want to see. Accordingly, you set yourself to win the child's love by loving it. You seek to excite affection by showing affection. So with God. And throughout our life in this world, and to all eternity beyond, He will constantly be showing us, in one way or another, more and more of His love, and thereby increasing our love to Him continually. The prospect before the adopted sons of God is an eternity of love" (J.I. Packer, Knowing God, 196).
[...] The Life of Adoption One of my primary responsibilities at Carolina Hope is to explore and articulate the beautiful connection between uppercase Adoption (i.e. God’s adoption of us) and lowercase adoption (i.e. our adoption of a child). We believe that the more we understand the ways in which these two forms of adoption are connected the more our experience of lowercase adoption will be enriched. Read the whole post. [...]