In this episode, CCEF faculty explore the profound doctrine of adoption into God's family, discussing its theological significance and personal implications. Our hosts reflect on their own experiences and the relational significance of understanding God as a loving Father. They discuss how we often struggle with an orphan mentality, emphasizing the importance of recognizing one's identity as a beloved child of God. Finally, they highlight the future inheritance that comes with being adopted into God's family.

Mentioned in this episode: The audio from our 2025 National Conference is available for purchase! All 27 sessions included. Learn more here.

00:00 Introduction to Adoption in God's Family
02:10 Personal Reflections on Adoption
06:00 Theological Insights on Adoption
10:17 Orphan Tendencies and God's Fatherhood
19:45 How the Father Addresses Our Orphan Mindsets
27:51 The Impact of Adoption on Relationships
31:00 The Hope of Adoption and Future Inheritance

Hello and welcome to our CCEF podcast, Where Life & Scripture Meet. My name is Gunner Gundersen and I have the privilege of serving as a faculty member and the Dean of Faculty at CCEF. And I'm here with my fellow faculty members, Esther Liu and Darby Strickland. And it's great to see you all again. Great to be together again for another episode, another conversation here.

Just looking back for a moment, just a couple weeks ago, we were able to host our national conference, which was called To Live Is Christ: The Life & Ministry of Paul. And as always, it was a delightful weekend that we had together with so many friends, both old and new, and we had the chance to learn really firsthand from Paul's life and his relationship with the risen Christ and his relationship with the many early believers that he walked with and sought to serve. If you were not able to be with us a couple weeks ago, you can purchase the audio from the conference online. And if you would like to learn more and to do that, you can do so at ccef.org/2025. That's ccef.org/2025.

We've mentioned before that we really enjoy in these conversations bringing different life dynamics, different life challenges, different arenas of life to Scripture and to ask what Scripture says about those things. And yet we also enjoy bringing Scripture to life, meaning starting with a scriptural passage or a scriptural theme or perhaps a theological idea and then to bring that to life and ask how that impacts our lives, how that shapes our thinking, and how that fuels and encourages our walk with the Lord. And today, we'd like to bring another Scripture-to-life topic. We've talked about recently progressive sanctification and really enjoyed that conversation. And today, we want to talk about our adoption into God's family, our adoption into God's family, and specifically to focus on the effects of our adoption into God's family. Could we talk just for a moment—what kind of led us to want to talk about adoption today?

I think as I reflected on this topic, one of the things that came up was how precious this doctrine has been to me personally in my own Christian life. A lot of theologians will argue that adoption is one of the most beautiful doctrines, not that we should really be ranking them, but they do say that there is a unique preciousness to the fact that the Lord does adopt us into his family. That is one of the most beautiful realities of the gospel, that we are brought into his family, that we belong there, that we are his in that way. I know for me personally, when I first became a Christian in my college days, this was one of the most precious doctrines for me. I had been exposed to a lot of teaching about God's forgiveness of sins, a lot of the doctrines of justification, sanctification, all the “tions.” And it was really the teaching about adoption that took me into a place where there's such relational richness and robustness. Justification brought me into this kind of courtroom imagery and it's like guilty, not guilty, etc. But it was the doctrine of adoption that took me out of the analogy and visual and took me into this familial, relational, intimate reality that we benefit from being united to Christ. And so it's just been really precious to me and I’m excited that we get to talk about it and unpack it a little bit more today together.

I would say similarly, Esther, when I got to seminary and we read Sinclair Ferguson's book, Children of the Living God, it just changed my world. I had no concept of what it meant to be a child of God in the way that he was talking about, all the privileges. I think what struck me is, like you're saying, that courtroom, I was either in God's favor or out of God's favor. Was I right with God? And I remember even just being in churches, in the church I grew up with it often talked about, you know, and this is true, we bring so much to depravity with us. So there was always this highlighting of, you know, when God sees you, it's like you're hiding, you're trembling behind Jesus. And it's like, Jesus is your shield. And that doctrine just changed my world, because it was like, no, God actually delights in you. He likes you. He has you as part of his family. Just totally gave a relationship and positionally changed how I thought about how I could actually relate to the Lord. I didn't have to cower when I spoke to him. He became a Father, a friend, so many other beautiful realities. And I can't tell you how many people I gave that book to in that season because it just, again, just lit up my world in a way that changed me in ways I can't even articulate.

It really is remarkable when you start stacking up these benefits of us being in Christ, that our sins are forgiven, that we are declared righteous before God even as we're sinners, by grace alone, through faith alone, and then God also adopts us into his family. J. I. Packer has called adoption “the crown jewel of redemption” to highlight how magnificent it is that in addition to those things that God has done, he has also adopted us into his own family. And what we want to talk about today is not necessarily like a thorough theological treatment of the doctrine of adoption, but to really focus some on the practical effects. What are the effects in our lives, in our hearts, in our relationship with the Lord and with others, of our adoption into God's family as his children, as we gain him as our Father? Before we dive into that, can we talk just a moment about in the gospel, how is it that we come to have God as our Father? How is it that we come to be sons and daughters of the living God?

I think the simplest way to put it is probably in how Ephesians 1 talks about all the benefits of what it means to have a union with Christ. It's part of our union. It's part of being his brother and his sister. He's given us a different kind of access to the Father. And all that comes with being part of a royal family and really being brought in in an intimate way. So yeah, it's like, again, I try to think of it as positionally, but it really just comes from, yeah, what it means to have our union with Christ. And that just changes our whole family. And that's why I think we talk about our other believers, our brothers and sisters, it comes from the same positional aspect.

Even as you talk about Ephesians, Darby, it reminds me of how Ephesians 1 begins of, before the foundation of the world he chose us. And there is something so precious in the “how” question that it is so much free, undeserved grace, that kind of the notion of before we could do or not do anything, we were chosen. And so I'm sure we'll get into this later of just how much knowing God as our Father addresses some of the ways that we feel like we need to earn or measure up or prove ourselves in a way to belong, to be loved, to be delighted in, and just how Ephesians and how all of these doctrines, really, it's the Lord choosing us. Ed Welch once used the phrase, it's a potluck and you don't bring anything to the potluck. And that's just one of the glorious realities that adoption is true. The how is the Lord's initiating and choosing and his grace upon us before we could do or not do anything.

I remember it was a number of years ago that I started becoming more aware of the depth of meaning that was there with our union with Christ and how central that doctrine was to our salvation and our relationship with God. And as it relates to adoption, just slowly realizing that it was through my union with Christ that I came to share in his status as a child of God, that he in a unique way is the Son of God and God himself. And also that because I'm united with him, I share in that status and inheritance as God's child. And to know that there's something of that status that I share was just such a remarkable thing to realize and all the effects of that and how the effects of that counteract so many different ways I am tempted to live and to operate in the world, in my life, in relationship with others, in relationship with God. And so that invincible union with Christ leading me to share in that status of sonship became remarkable to me. And I had the privilege of teaching a class at that time called Spiritual Life Dynamics where I taught on union with Christ every year at least. And I remember being so reinvigorating and comforting to me to walk back through that and to watch students be invigorated in their lives as well, as their eyes were open to who they are in Christ.

One of the reasons why it was, I think, so important and had such an impact on me and others, and I can tell it's had such an impact on both of you as well, is that we all have these kind of orphan tendencies where we operate as though we don't have the Heavenly Father that we have. Can we talk about that for a little bit, what are some of the things that we can struggle with that kind of function like these orphan tendencies, these tendencies that the fatherhood of God is really meant to address in our hearts and lives over time?

I think one for me is just the idea that God somehow tolerates me. He is a saving God and I don't wan to say he has to save me, right? Because he doesn't, right? Even that's a gift. But there is this idea of, well, she's committed, so I’m just going to keep dragging her along ,like almost on the caboose of the train. She can come on, but you know, it's a third-class ticket. And I don't know where that comes from, but that's just one of mine. So just God tolerates me versus that sense of delight. And I just think, even in Ephesians it talks about “in love,” he's done this in love. And I think there's just so many ways that we just think about God's character in good ways, but when we take it out of the relational aspect, we forget that it's motivated by his love for his son and his people.

I think one aspect that has been meaningful to me is processing how God as Father can contradict my orphan mentality of I'm left to fend for myself, I have to protect myself, I have to look out for myself. My safety, my well-being is found in my own hands rather than a Father who's actively caring, watching over, helping, providing so many of the teachings of God as Father talks about him giving us good gifts, being the Giver of good gifts, being the One who protects and looks after and watches over. And how easily I can slip into this mentality that it is all up to me, and if I don't do it for myself, then my life will be a catastrophe. I think I really noticed this in a season of considering marriage. And there was a lot of anxiety for me about walking into marriage. I feel like weddings and marriages in general can evoke a lot of father imagery. You know, the father walking the daughter down the aisle, the father-daughter dance. There's just a lot of fatherly components to the process of getting married, even asking for your parents blessing, etc. I lost my dad when I was eleven years old. And so, I remember feeling so vulnerable in the dating process, considering the prospect of marriage, because I didn't have an earthly father figure and all these fears about marriage and, oh, there's no dad to kind of meet with the husband-to-be and say, hey, if you hurt my daughter, like I'll kill you or whatnot, you know, those conventional proverbial father figures. I didn't have that, and there was just this great vulnerability that I felt and this deep desire of like, oh man, I wish I had a father, I wish I had a dad who could look out for me, who could protect me and make sure that I would be safe as I go into such a life-altering, permanent decision. And yeah, that was me slipping into kind of this mentality where there was room to genuinely grieve that I didn't have an earthly father to play that role. But there was also this needing to be reminded that I do have a Father, even if I don't have an earthly father here, and how meaningful that was to me to grow in that and to fight to grow into that during that particular season.

I think that raises a great point because so many of us, myself included, counselees, we hear God as Father through the lens of our own fathers, right? And it's sometimes hard to separate that God is a wholly different kind of Father. In your case, you know, he's present and able to protect. In mine, when I was 10, my father had a stroke and he lost, like, the emotional center of his brain. So I remember as a kid, he'd delight and he'd be playing with us. But I remember really striving, like, I have to get straight As because I have to do something that might—like, if I'd perform, I kept thinking, if I do something, I will get a reaction out of him. Well, there was no reaction to be had. And so I think that's made me, shaped how I saw God's relation to me. I just think that's true of, like, many women I work with who've been mistreated by a father. They have a hard time seeing him as gentle and kind. So I think it's just a beautiful concept, but there are also huge stumbling blocks for us seeing what Scripture says about it versus relating to our own experience of our own fathers, which is really hard sometimes to separate.

I think this is one of those places where we can very clearly see how this profound reality and love and relationship of God to us as our Father has some significant roadblocks towards landing in our hearts and affecting us in the ways that you can tell the Scriptures want this truth to affect us. It really does take, I love how the apostle Paul talks about being given the spirit of sonship, that we need the spirit of sonship, the spirit of God's own Son to draw us toward the Father and to remind us in various ways of his fatherly care for us and all of what that means, which is something we learn progressively over time through our lives as we walk with him. We need that spirit of sonship to instill in us these profound relational realities that so many things within us and around us compete with and press back against and say to us in so many different ways, it can't be true.

Even just knowing his commitment to our good. Another area that I live more like an orphan than as a son is I think of God's holding out a carrot. Like here's this thing and I'm going to take it away at the last minute. Or I get to see other people's lives look a lot easier than mine. And it's just feeling, looking at other people and thinking, oh, their life seems easier or they've received more blessings, and feeling like an unfavored child. So sometimes it's like we look at the evidences of our own life and misinterpret God's goodness to us personally because we don't have the benefits that we might perceive somebody else has. I would just say that's quite another stumbling block. Instead of just recognizing, no, this is, I belong in every same way and I am loved just as deeply, regardless of what the circumstances look like. We often engage love by what our perceived benefits are, rather than the greatness of the lover. And I think this doctrine really forces us to look at, who am I that God who is so lovely would love me? And how wonderful he is. It's so easy to bend it back on myself and look at it through my myopic lens of what my life looks like versus how wonderful he actually is.

It's reminding me, Darby, of Genesis 1–3, where God generously, bountifully creates this amazing world and gifts it to Adam and Eve and says, go and enjoy. And then here's this one restricted tree. And then the evil one comes in and focuses on that one restriction and says, God isn't good. He's not who he claims to be. And begins to sow these seeds of a negative perspective on this God whose entire world he's made in Genesis 1 is just, it's good, it's good, it's good, it's good, it's very good, and it's for you, and I'm for you. And how that dynamic is meant to be restored through redemption for us to be brought into God's family and to say, you're good, and you love me, and you're generous, and you're for me, and all of these things through Christ.

And all that it cost him to get us there, we forget the supreme sacrifice that he made to make us his own. Or at least I can, because I'm focusing on, gosh, I wish my checkbook had a little more buffer in it. Or I wish my children weren't struggling with these particular things in this season. It's like I'm forgetting everything that he has done to make me his. And I can do that so easily.

What are some other maybe orphan tendencies that we can hold onto, some things we might struggle with, kind of at the street level in our daily lives or in our mentalities and our hearts that the fatherhood of God is really meant to address? And I'll just say something, I remember Tim Keller saying in a story about the Exodus where he said, as the Israelites are getting out of Egypt and released from slavery, but then they get into the wilderness and they have almost this yearning to go back as you reach kind of Exodus 17, 18 and beyond, he just said, you know, it's easier to take the slave out of Egypt than to take Egypt out of the slave. And I think I have seen too, it's easier to take the child out of the orphanage than take the orphanage out of the child. Because we so easily take those mentalities with us of we are alone, we're on our own, we walk independently, even we don't need the One who says we so deeply need him. What are some of those mindsets that we might flesh out here a little bit that the fatherhood of God is meant to address?

I think our weakness, right, we are meant to be dependent upon our Father who's going to give us everything that we need. But I think we so easily see neediness as a failure or weakness, especially in our culture. Any kind of weakness is a failure. We should be able to figure it out. We should have strength. We shouldn’t have... yeah, we should be able to perform at every level in every arena versus, no, we are people who have weaknesses and are in need of our Father to help us.

And one thing that still comes up for me to this day is a fear of being a burden or a bother to someone. Dovetailing with what you said, Darby, of like neediness, weakness, needing help outside. And it's just the constant avoidance of wanting to burden someone, wanting to be seen as, oh you're not welcomed here, or this begrudging accepting of me. So often even to this day I live in this default of, oh, I don't want to waste your time. So like in any conversation that I have, unless it's with someone that I know really well, my default before trust has really built and the relationship has really grown intimate is, oh, I'm taking up your time and how do I take up less of your time? Whereas the Father is someone who always receives us, always listening, always wanting to hear, delights when we pray, delights when we cry out to him, makes it so clear that there's something so beautiful about his children reaching out to him, crying, Abba, Father. And the ways that he describes himself as a Father, the ways that he describes the delight that he has when we come to him, the constant invitation that he gives, “come to me, come to me,” throughout Scripture, just undoes some of that spirit that I have of, oh, I'm kind of this unloved, annoying little pest and how do I minimize the burden and the annoyance and the inconvenience that I am to any given person? And that's something that I still see in myself to this day. And it's hard to undo that. It's hard to relearn a different way with our Father who has a generous heart of love towards us.

So tempting to see God as maybe little more than a disappointed disciplinarian on a constant basis, instead of seeing all these other aspects of who he is and seeing his discipline as well as an act of love that is meant to refine us and to shape us and to conform us to the image of his son and to even confirm what he had begun in us and has begun in us as we go along through a lifetime.

I think that's a really important one, Gunner, because if you don't understand the depth of God's love for you and his delight in you as a child, any correction you receive just can feel gutting, versus understanding it's actually good. Again, thinking my own children, I want them to know that when I'm rerouting or steering or correcting them, it's because it's out of love for them. It's not to make my life better. It's because I want them to really flourish in their life. But it's hard to, if we forget, if we don't understand God as our Father appropriately, it's so easy to crumble when a correction comes and the shame can live on, yeah, in ways that are really destructive to our relationship with the Lord.

It's so interesting because I was reading the Westminster Catechism in preparation for this episode and what it says about adoption. And the one thing that stuck out to me the most in the list of different things that adoption means, it was discipline that stuck out to me actually. Fatherly care, all of that, that's always going to be meaningful to me. But it was the discipline facet that I realized I had kind of lost sight of in my initial kind of brainstormings of adoption and such.

And just being able to reflect on that, was so precious that fatherly care doesn't mean he just gives me everything that I want and generous provider doesn't necessarily mean he just gives me everything that I want and all of these things and my life just goes my way. But there is something so loving and so wise about his fatherly care, that it's not just a genie that I can make a wish to or a vending machine that I can just pick like I want the Twix bar and then it comes out and I get exactly what I want in life. But so much of fatherly care and wise fatherly care is actually sometimes he knows, not sometimes, he always knows what's better for us. And sometimes that's not what we would have chosen for ourselves, what we would have preferred, but he loves us so much and he has such a vision and such a wisdom over our lives that he's leading and orchestrating our lives in a way that's so good for us at the end and is so filled with his goodness and wisdom. He wants better than what we often are willing to settle for ourselves. And part of that discipline is I want something better for you. And this is going to be hard, this is going to be painful. Discipline never necessarily feels pleasant at the time, Hebrews says that. And yet, the goodness embedded in it is a Father who cares too much about his children to let them settle for what they would be willing to settle for because he wants what's best. And I just have really appreciated even just sitting on that and reflecting on my own life and places where the Lord is disciplining me and how to reframe that into such a goodness, such a love.

It's actually reminding me, my daughter went to a ballet intensive this summer for four weeks and it was so interesting, she'd get really excited. She said, I received a lot of corrections. And she said that meant they were investing in me, mom. And she's like, and some of the other girls, they would just take that as wrong. She's like, but I get really excited when I receive corrections. It's because they're looking at me. They want me to be better. I thought, what a great attitude to be called out in a room of 30 people, but she saw it as an investment. I think that's a great way to, it's been helpful to me to think about discipline as it's an investment. It takes time and energy to do that.

I also think of all the different relational effects that our shared adoption is meant to have in the family of God. We actually have four children that we've adopted. And it's interesting because one of the first questions that people will ask us, and they'll ask our young adult kids as well, is are you related or are they related? And it's this interesting interest in wanting to know almost how “real” is the relationship. And we try to take it as a curiosity about our family, but it's interesting how constant that question is, and I know that many other adoptive families face that same question consistently. And I think that gets at some of the heart of our relationships in the church, too, where I think in our heart of hearts, I know I can wrestle with how related am I really to these people around me? Our shared adoption in God's family that then makes us not only his children, but brothers and sisters with one another in and through Christ, is such a remarkable truth that makes every gathering of my local church and every meeting of a believer genuinely a kind of family reunion and is the coming together of this new family that God has created through Christ. And when I start in that place, this is the new family of God that he has redeemed and adopted into his family, it gives me a very different starting point for those relationships than like a cold open in those relationships where it's, well, who do I click with, and how does this conversation go, and are people able to make small talk or not, and are these people mature enough to be vulnerable, and am I going to be mature enough to be who I ought to be with them, and those kinds of things. It really changes things when we know that we really are related in the way that God says that we are. I remember a woman who had adopted some children and she had both biological and adopted children. They were out at a restaurant together, had quite a large family, and a server came up, a female server, and just said in front of everybody, oh, are all these yours? And the woman said, yes, they're all mine. And the woman then said, well, you know what I mean. And the mom in public said, and you know what I mean. And I think that's such a great moment that captures the tenacity of a parent that wants to drive home both to their children and also to the watching world, yes, they really are related. They really do belong to me. And these children are all mine and I am theirs. And I've always loved that story and I've loved the moxie of it, the guts of it, but I've loved what it represents about the Father's declaration over all that he's adopted, that these are truly mine and I am theirs.

It's so beautiful to think of that because it's just one of those things where if I were the one choosing, I would have never chosen myself to be a part of the family. You know, I'd have this checklist of qualities of like, maybe this would be better. And maybe that comes from my own not being a parent yet and not yet experiencing kind of what that's like when you have a child and you just love them and you're overflowing with that affection. For me, when I think of it, if I'm thinking about how do I recruit a family or what's the family that I would create, I think I would just kind of pick and choose and I wouldn't even choose myself in a sense. And yet what a gift it is that the Father looks at us and knows us, knows me, knows the good, but also the really ugly, knows the strengths, but also the very real weaknesses and vulnerabilities and liabilities even, and says what you were saying, Gunner, she's mine and I'm hers. And I'm going to solidify that in Christ as I bring her in as a daughter from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light. And for anyone who struggles with shame, I feel like the doctrine of adoption, this reality of adoption is a beautiful one. So often we fall into that self-condemnation or sense of unworthiness. And there's a way that being adopted richly, meaningfully speaks into that of a love that redeems and begins to shine light into the darkness of what can be shame. So I really appreciate that story. And I really appreciate that firm declaration that the Lord has, and it's so undeserved.

I'll close with one other scene that comes to mind. My oldest son is now 19, but when he was just less than two, I remember sitting in a courtroom with him on my lap in southern California where we were living at the time. And we were finalizing the stateside part of our adoption. And I remember taking the pen and signing the legal documents to finalize his status in our family, his legal status in our family. And I remember him sitting there and obviously not knowing what it was or what was happening at his young age. He took his finger, his right index finger, and he traced right under my signature as I was signing, following along with it. And then I raised my right hand and my wife did as well next to me. And we swore, following after the judges words as he introduced them to us. But the line that stood out to me was that we would from this point forward treat this child with all the rights and privileges of a natural born child, including inheritance. And that last part of including inheritance stood out to me because it was this like lifelong, forward-looking commitment. It wasn't something we were just doing in the moment. And as special as the moment was and the photos from that day was and the friends and family who stood by us and were witnesses to that event were, it had a much longer trajectory that I was signing onto and that our son was being brought into. And it reminds me of one other feature of our adoption into God's family, one other effect, and that is hope, that there is constantly this focus on this future inheritance, meaning this is a Father that we'll never lose. And that just is such a profound thing to extend this incredible blessing in real time through eternity to know that he will always be ours and we will always be his. It's been really beautiful to reflect with you on this doctrine of adoption. I feel like we could keep going at length on this and be only blessed for doing it. So thank you for the conversation and thanks to all of you who've joined us.