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Adopted for Life (Updated and Expanded Edition)

E-BookEPUB0 - No protectionE-Book
256 Seiten
Englisch
Crosswayerschienen am14.10.2015
The doctrine of adoption-God's decision to adopt sinful men and women into his family-stands at the heart of Christianity. In light of this, Christians' efforts to adopt beautifully illustrate the truth of the gospel. In this popular-level and practical manifesto, Russell Moore encourages Christians to adopt children and to help other Christian families to do the same. He shows that adoption is not just about couples who have struggled to have children. Rather, it's about an entire culture within evangelicalism-a culture that sees adoption as part of the Great Commission mandate and as a sign of the gospel itself.

Russell Moore (PhD, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is public theologian at Christianity Today and director of Christianity Today's Public Theology Project. He is a widely-sought commentator and the author of several books, including The Kingdom of Christ; Adopted for Life; and Tempted and Tried. Moore blogs regularly at RussellMoore.com and tweets at @drmoore. He and his wife, Maria, have five sons.mehr
Verfügbare Formate
TaschenbuchKartoniert, Paperback
EUR18,00
E-BookEPUB0 - No protectionE-Book
EUR11,79

Produkt

KlappentextThe doctrine of adoption-God's decision to adopt sinful men and women into his family-stands at the heart of Christianity. In light of this, Christians' efforts to adopt beautifully illustrate the truth of the gospel. In this popular-level and practical manifesto, Russell Moore encourages Christians to adopt children and to help other Christian families to do the same. He shows that adoption is not just about couples who have struggled to have children. Rather, it's about an entire culture within evangelicalism-a culture that sees adoption as part of the Great Commission mandate and as a sign of the gospel itself.

Russell Moore (PhD, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is public theologian at Christianity Today and director of Christianity Today's Public Theology Project. He is a widely-sought commentator and the author of several books, including The Kingdom of Christ; Adopted for Life; and Tempted and Tried. Moore blogs regularly at RussellMoore.com and tweets at @drmoore. He and his wife, Maria, have five sons.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9781433549243
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format Hinweis0 - No protection
FormatE101
Verlag
Erscheinungsjahr2015
Erscheinungsdatum14.10.2015
Seiten256 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse341 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.14346117
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe



1

Adoption, Jesus, and You

Why You Should Read This Book, Especially If You Don´t Want To

My sons have a certain look in their eyes when they are conspiring to do something wrong. They have another, similar look when they are trying to read my face to see if I think what they´re doing is something wrong. It was this second look I could see buzzing across both of their faces as they walked up the steps to the old pulpit.

My boys were at a chapel service on the campus where I serve to train pastors for Christian ministry; they were there to hear me preach. They know better than to misbehave in church, and this seemed kind of like a church service. They also knew that I had warned them they could only sit up on the front row if they were still and quiet, with nothing distracting going on down there while I was preaching. But a friend of mine had other plans for them that day.

Benjamin and Timothy, he had whispered only a few minutes earlier to my sons, will you help me introduce your daddy before he preaches? I fidgeted with my uncomfortable over-the-ear microphone while I watched these two strong, vibrant, little five-year-old boys walk up the platform steps. They were peering at me the whole time to make sure they weren´t breaking the rules that we´d agreed upon. I watched them stand behind the pulpit and listened to them answer questions from my colleague. Who is going to preach today? my friend asked. Daddy, Benjamin responded. And what´s he going to preach about? he continued. Timothy answered quickly, leaning into the microphone, Jesus.

For a couple of seconds, my mind flashed back to the first time I ever saw these two boys. They were lying in excrement and vomit, covered in heat blisters and flies, in an orphanage somewhere in a little mining community in Russia. Maria and I had applied to adopt and had gone on the first of two trips, not knowing who, if anyone, we would find waiting for us. Immediately upon landing in the former Soviet Union, I wondered if we had made the worst mistake of our lives.

Sitting in a foreign airport, with the smell of European perfume, human sweat, and cigarette smoke wafting all around us, Maria and I recommitted to God that we would trust him and that we would adopt whomever he directed us to, regardless of what medical or emotional problems they might have. A Russian judge told us she had two gray-eyed boys picked out for us, both of whom had been abandoned by their mothers to a hospital in the little village about an hour from where we were staying.

Sure enough, the orphanage authorities, through our translators, cataloged a terrifying list of medical problems-including fetal alcohol syndrome-for one, if not both, of the boys. My wife and I looked at each other as if to say, This is what the Lord has for us, so here we go. The nurse led us up some stairs, down a dank hallway, and into a tiny room with two beds. I can still see the younger of the two, now Timothy, rocking up and down against the bars of his crib, grinning widely. The older, now Benjamin, was more reserved, stroking my five o´clock shadow with his hand and seeing (I came to realize) a man most probably for the very first time in his life. Both the boys had hair matted down on their heads, and one of them had crossed eyes. Both of them moved slowly and rigidly, almost like stop-motion clay animated characters from the Christmas television specials of our 1970s childhoods. And we loved them both, at an intuitive and almost primal level, from the very first second.

The transformation of these two ex-orphans into the sons I saw behind the pulpit that day and see every day of my life running through my house with Lego toys and construction-paper drawings motivates me to write this book. The thought that there are thousands more like them in orphanages in Russia, in government facilities in China, and in foster care systems in the United States haunts me enough to sit at this computer and type.

I don´t know who you are, reading this book. Maybe you´re standing in a bookstore, flipping past these pages. Maybe you´re reading this book a few minutes at a time, keeping it in a drawer so your spouse won´t see it. Maybe you never thought you´d read a book about adoption. Maybe you´re wondering if you should.

Well, okay. I never thought I´d write a book about adoption, as you´ll see soon enough. Like I said, I don´t know who you are. But I know that I am writing this to you. I invite you to spend the next little bit thinking with me about a subject that has everything to do with you, whoever you are.

Whenever I told people I was working on a book on adoption, they´d often say something along the lines of, Great. So, is the book about the doctrine of adoption or, you know, real adoption? That´s a hard question to answer because you can´t talk about the one without talking about the other. Also, it is not as though we master one aspect and then move to the other-from the vertical to the horizontal or the other way around. That´s not the picture God has embedded in his creation work.

The Bible tells us that human families are reflective of an eternal fatherhood (Eph. 3:14-15). We know, then, what human fatherhood ought to look like on the basis of how our Father God behaves toward us. But the reverse is also true. We see something of the way our God is fatherly toward us through our relationships with human fathers. And so Jesus tells us that in our human father´s provision and discipline we get a glimpse of God´s active love for us (Matt. 7:9-11; cf. Heb. 12:5-17). The same truth is at work in adoption.

Adoption is, on the one hand, gospel. In this, adoption tells us who we are as children of the Father. Adoption as gospel tells us about our identity, our inheritance, and our mission as sons of God. Adoption is also defined as mission. In this, adoption tells us our purpose in this age as the people of Christ. Missional adoption spurs us to join Christ in advocating for the helpless and the abandoned.

As soon as you peer into the truth of the one aspect, you fall headlong into the truth of the other, and vice versa. That´s because it´s the way the gospel is. Jesus reconciles us to God and to each other. As we love our God, we love our neighbor; as we love our neighbor, we love our God. We believe Jesus in heavenly things-our adoption in Christ; so we follow him in earthly things-the adoption of children. Without the theological aspect, the emphasis on adoption too easily is seen as mere charity. Without the missional aspect, the doctrine of adoption too easily is seen as mere metaphor.

But adoption is contested, both in its cosmic and missional aspects. The Scriptures tell us there are unseen beings in the air around us who would rather we not think about what it means to be who we are in Christ. These rulers of this age would rather we ignore both the eternal reality and the earthly icon of it. They would rather we find our identity, our inheritance, and our mission according to what we can see and verify as ours-according to what the Bible calls the flesh (Romans 8)-rather than according to the veiled rhythms of the Spirit of life. That´s why adoption isn´t charity-it´s war.

The gospel of Jesus Christ means our families and churches ought to be at the forefront of the adoption of orphans close to home and around the world. As we become more attuned to the gospel, we´ll have more of a burden for orphans. As we become more adoption friendly, we´ll be better able to understand the gospel. This book calls us to look forward to an adoptive missional church. In this book I want to call us all to consider how encouraging adoption-whether we adopt or whether we help others adopt-can help us peer into the ancient mystery of our faith in Christ and can help us restore the fracturing unity and the atrophied mission of our congregations.

It is one thing when the culture doesn´t get adoption. What else could one expect when all of life is seen as the quest of selfish genes for survival? It is one thing when the culture doesn´t get adoption and so speaks of buying a cat as adopting a pet. But when those who follow Christ think the same way, we betray that we miss something crucial about our own salvation.

Adoption is not just about couples who want children-or who want more children. Adoption is about an entire culture within our churches, a culture that sees adoption as part of our Great Commission mandate and as a sign of the gospel itself. This book is intended for families who want to adopt and wonder whether they should. It is also intended for parents with children who´ve been adopted and who wonder how to raise them from here. It is for middle-aged fathers and mothers whose children have just told them they are thinking about adoption.

But this book is also, and perhaps most especially, for the man who flinches when his wife raises the issue of adoption because he wants his own kids -and who hates himself a little for thinking like that. It is for the wife who keeps the adoption application papers in a pile on the exercise bicycle upstairs-as a last resort -but who is praying fervently right now for two...

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Autor

Russell Moore (PhD, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is public theologian at Christianity Today and director of Christianity Today's Public Theology Project. He is a widely-sought commentator and the author of several books, including The Kingdom of Christ; Adopted for Life; and Tempted and Tried. Moore blogs regularly at RussellMoore.com and tweets at @drmoore. He and his wife, Maria, have five sons.