This book is a plea that God himself, as revealed most clearly and fully in Jesus’s death and resurrection, be seen and enjoyed as the final and greatest gift of the gospel.
The gospel of Jesus and his many precious blessings are not ultimately what makes the good news good, but means of seeing and savoring the Savior himself. Forgiveness is good because it opens the way to enjoying God himself. Justification is good because it wins access to the presence and pleasure of God himself. Eternal life is good because it becomes the everlasting enjoyment of Jesus.
All God’s good gifts are loving to the degree that they lead us to God himself. This is the love of God: doing everything necessary, most painfully in the death of his Son, to enthrall us with what is most deeply and durably satisfying—namely, himself.
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One of the ambitious dreams that Reclaiming Adoption and its authors share with the Apostle Paul is that when Christians hear the word “adoption,” they will think first about their adoption by God. As it now stands, Christians usually think first about the adoption of children. Reclaiming Adoption sets out to change this situation by providing breathtaking views of God’s love for and delight in His children—views that will free you to live boldly in this world from God’s acceptance, not in order to gain it. Reclaiming Adoption begins by examining Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son because it ultimately puts God the Father’s love on display—a love that embraces the younger son with uninhibited joy (Luke 15:20) and goes out to entreat the self-righteous older son to come join the celebration (Luke 15:28). Reclaiming Adoption believes that behind the Parable of the Prodigal Son(s) is Scripture’s teaching on adoption. The story of the Bible is that God the Father sent His only true and eternal Son on a mission, and that mission was to bring many wayward and rebellious sons home to glory (Hebrews 2:10), to adopt them into His family. That is the Story behind the story of the Prodigal Sons. That is the only story that gives our stories any meaning or significance. Dan Cruver and his co-authors are convinced that if Christians learn to first think about their adoption by God, and only then about the adoption of children, they will enjoy deeper communion with the God who is love, and experience greater missional engagement with the pain and suffering of this world. That’s what this book is about. What the orphan, the stranger, and the marginalized in our world need most is churches that are filled with Christians who live daily in the reality of God’s delight in them. Reclaiming Adoption can transform the way you view and live in this world for the glory of God and the good of our world’s most needy.
When Jesus said to Nicodemus, ‘You must be born again’, the devout and learned religious leader was unsure what Jesus meant. It would seem nothing has changed. Today ‘born again Christians’ fill churches that are seen as ineffectual at best, and even characterized by the ‘mosaic’ generation as ‘unchristian’. The term ‘born again’ has been devalued both in society and in the church. Those claiming to be ‘born again’ live lives that are indistinguishable from those who don’t; they sin the same, embrace injustice the same, covet the same, do almost everything the same. Being ‘born again’ is now defined by what people say they believe. The New Testament however defines Christians very differently. “When Jesus said to Nicodemus, “You must be born again” (John 3:7), he was not sharing interesting and unimportant information. He was leading him to eternal life… If he does that for you (or if he already has), then you are (or you will be) truly, invincibly, finally alive.” John Piper
