Thanksgiving for Adoption

As I experience the joy of watching my son eat his first Thanksgiving meal tomorrow, I have so much to be grateful for. Above all else, I am grateful for adoption. Not just earthly/physical adoption, but our spiritual adoption by our Lord and Savior.

In Paul’s epistles, he chose the metaphor of adoption to signify our spiritual conversion. In order to understand his metaphor, it’s important to fully understand the Roman practice of adoption.

Structural Truths of Roman Adoption:

• All legal rights to the biological family have been relinquished, and the adoptee had full rights of a child of his adoptive father. The child literally and legally had a new father. We have a new Father through our salvation.
• The adopted child had full rights as an heir to the adoptive father’s estate. Nothing could take away his inheritance, even if the adoptive father had additional biological children. In the same way, our Heavenly Father has assured us that we are no longer to receive the inheritance of our past life (an eternity in hell), but have the inheritance of His children (an eternity in Heaven).
• Legally, the old life of the adopted person was forgiven and forgotten. For example, if he had debt, it was completely cancelled upon his adoption. The adopted person was considered a wholly new person beginning a new life, and his past was forgotten. Do I even need to explain the spiritual significance of this point?! God has wiped clean every sin, every debt, every fault of our past. We are a new creature in Him (Amen).

Paul understood that, like the Roman adoption practice, our spiritual adoption was all about putting away an old life and beginning  a new life in Him. Our old debts our cancelled, we have an inheritance, and we are fully God’s child. God offers us this life.

Galatians 4:4-7   “When the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship. Because you are his sons, God sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, ‘Abba, Father.’ So you are no longer a slave, but God’s child; and since you are his child, God has made you also an heir.”

This Thanksgiving, take time to thank our Abba Father for adopting us as His children and showing us His unconditional Fatherly love.