It’s likely that if you are reading this devotional on May 10 or 11, 2009, our family is gathering at our son’s home to welcome our newest grandchild home from India.  A year ago I would never have imagined that we would have 14 grandchildren, including our precious little granddaughter, Siddhi.  As I prepared this month’s ezine I found the following devotional that I had written a number of years ago and in light of our own growing family, it seemed like a perfect message of encouragement from my heart to yours. 
 

During a counseling session with a woman who has lost every family member through death, Chuck said, “You still have a family.  It’s your covenant family and it’s filled with brothers and sisters who will embrace and love you as a blood relative.”  Read on and realize that if Jesus is your Savior, He is also your elder brother.  As your big brother, He wants you to experience every blessing that our Father in heaven extended to Him.

Daily Reading  John 17: 20-26
Key Verses      John 17:22, 23

I have given them the glory that You gave Me, that they may be one as We are One: I in them and You in Me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that You sent Me and have loved them even as You have loved Me.

God’s Love

I have four sisters and two brothers. Three of my siblings have adopted children. We don’t categorize the children by the way they came into our family. We consider them all ours, they belong to all of us.

Jesus, our elder brother, views us, His adopted brothers and sisters, similarly. He wants us to have and to experience everything He has. In the Passion Discourse, John 17, Jesus prays to His Father as He prepares for the crucifixion and resurrection. We can hear the longing of His heart for His real home - heaven. But He tells His Father that He also longs for those the Father gave to Him to experience the same Father love that He has. There is no sibling rivalry or selfishness.

The Westminster Shorter Catechism states: “Adoption is an act of God’s free grace, whereby we are received into the number and have a right to all the privileges of the sons of God.”  How can this be? How can we understand such love? 1 John 3:1 proclaims, “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called the children of God!” And that is what we are! John is really asking, “What kind of foreign love is this?” Love to the Greeks meant doing something nice for someone who was nice to you. John changed that meaning when he described God loving us even when we were sinners and His enemies. Someone has said that is why no one could have concocted the scriptures. The whole premise of God’s love was absolutely foreign to this culture. But when something is foreign, don’t we need to study it?

Just as an adopted child sometimes needs constant reassurance of their parents’ love, we often need that same constant assurance as God’s adopted children. Are you studying His love the way you would study a foreign language? How many of us are living like orphans rather than like sons and daughters of the King? Are you a daughter or are you an orphan? If you are a daughter of the King, are you living like a daughter? Or are you living like an orphan? Every time you are tempted to live like an orphan, quote 1 John 3:1 and ask God to make His Word the channel that opens your heart to a deeper awareness of who you are as His loved daughter.

Dear Father, I call You Father because that is what You are.  Thank You for adopting me into Your family.  I pray others will recognize me as one of Yours because of the strong family resemblance.  For that is what I am!  Your daughter.

Sharon W. Betters