A Spirit of Adoption

This weekend I went on the Women's Retreat with The Grove. It was a huge step out of my comfort zone since I know so few women there. What a change after being at Central for over 15 years, and I was so nervous to go without having my core group of friends that I have known for so long! But God is so good and used this weekend to again confirm that we are right where we need to be. The weekend was about prayer. Using the guideline of the Lord's Prayer, we had four sessions: adoration (praise), confession, thanksgiving, and supplication (asking God for what we need). Saturday night after learning about supplication, we were able to our learning into action. We broke into small prayer groups for any topic that God was putting on your heart to talk to Him about. Some of the groups were for marriage, parenting, finances, salvation, healing, but there was even a prayer group specifically for adoption. Our of 66 women on the retreat our prayer group had 9 women who had adopted or were in the process of adopting. I believe that God is moving in our church to bring families together with children who need families. We also read verses from the Bible where God talks about adoption. God calls us to look after the orphans, but He also says that He has adopted us as His children!

James 1:27 -- Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. (NIV)

Ephesians 1:5 -- God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure. (NLT)

Psalm 139:16 -- your eyes saw my unformed body.
All the days ordained for me
were written in your book
before one of them came to be. (NIV)

John 14:18 -- I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. -Jesus (NIV)

Romans 8:15-17 -- For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship (adoption). And by him we cry, "Abba, Father." The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children. Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory. (NIV)

At the time, we didn't understand why we felt the need to leave our other church. We still have many friends who we love there. But now I see that God needed us to be at The Grove. As one friend said, we needed our kids to grow up in a church that looked like we do. And you can't help but see so many interracial families at The Grove. When our baby comes home we will look different from many other families on our street, at the store, or at school, but when we go to church it will feel like home. And, as our pastor pointed out two weeks ago, we will also look like Heaven. When John was getting a "sneak peak" of Heaven so he could tell us about it, he wrote, "After this I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb (Jesus). They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands." -Revelation 7:9