Initiated Into Adoption

by John Eldredge

“He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will…which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.” (Ephesians 1:5-6)


We aren’t meant to figure life out on our own. God wants to father us. The truth is, he has been fathering us for a long time we just haven’t had the eyes to see it. He wants to father us much more intimately, but we have to be in a posture to receive it. What that involves is a new way of seeing, a fundamental reorientation of how we look at life, and our situation in it.

First, we allow that we are unfinished people, partial men and women, mostly child on the inside, and we need initiation. In many, many ways. Second, we turn from our independence and all the ways we either charge at life or shrink from it; this may be one of the most basic and the most crucial ways a person repents. I say “repent” because our approach to life is based on the conviction that God, for the most part, doesn’t show up much. I understand where the conviction came from, battle it constantly myself, but still it’s faithless, is it not? We must be willing to take an enormous risk and open our hearts to the possibility that God is initiating us maybe in the very things in which we thought he’d abandoned us. We open ourselves up to being fathered.

I’ll admit, it doesn’t come easily. A sort of fundamental mistrust is something we learn through the course of our days, built on that core mistrust in God we inherited from Adam. Making the switch will feel awkward. As Gerald May says, the more we’ve become accustomed to seeking life apart from God, the more “abnormal and stressful” it seems “to look for God directly.”
Especially as a Father, fathering us. But it is worth it. It is worth it. Worth allowing ourselves to be fathered, accepting that this new way of living will take some getting used to, and taking the posture that we’ll do whatever it takes to get used to it.

What I’m suggesting is that we reframe the way we look at our lives. And the way we look at our relationships with God. The reframing begins when we see that a person’s life is a process of initiation into true masculinity and femininity. It is a series of stages we soak in and progress through. And as for God, I believe that what he is primarily up to at any point in a person’s life is initiating him. So much of what we interpret as hassles or trials or screw-ups on our part are in fact God fathering us, taking us through something in order to strengthen us, or heal us, or dismantle some unholy thing in us.

In other words, initiate us into our true position as adopted children of a good Father.

This Week
Ask the Lord to help you reframe the way you approach life and give you the grace to do whatever it takes to allow yourself to be fathered.

Prayer
“Father, your word says that I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me. Please help me to reframe the way I approach life, and give me the grace to open myself up to be fathered by you.”


(Adapted from The Way of the Wild Heart by John Eldredge. Watch John on LIFE Today on Monday and Tuesday, January 21-22. )