God's Adoption for the FatherlessSample

Day One – The Fatherless vs God’s Dream for a Family

At Southwood HS in Shreveport, the police arrested 23 students over three days for violence. A father in the community gathered parents and organized Dads on Duty, 40 men who patrolled the school in shifts. There hasn’t been a fight since, and the culture of the school became more positive.

All because dads got involved.

The community could have given up on those kids and brought harsher punishments. Some of the Dads on Duty had been raised in single-parent homes, so they knew the root problem. They chose to father those students instead.

Seeing the world full of self-destruction, God could have wiped us out, which we deserved, but he didn’t. God sent his Son to provide a way to the father. He knew the core issue.

We live among one of the most fatherless generations in the history of the world. I don’t mean single mother homes alone. Beyond the breakdown of the family, people feel and act like orphans – abandoned by God and alone. We call this the Orphan Spirit, permeating our culture and the church.

Everyone deals with the Orphan Spirit to some degree. The scripture reveals God as Father, so the Devil attempts to make us feel fatherless, attaching his lies to our trauma.

The Truth – God’s dream is for a family. It excites him to expand his family!

Three ways exist to join a family: marriage, birth, or adoption, and the scripture uses them all as examples. The Apostle Paul highlights the concept of adoption because, in the days of Roman law, a person could disinherit a child born to them, but they couldn’t with an adopted child. Adoption was more secure.

Adoption isn’t an accident but a choice. God’s overwhelming love calls us and reveals how he sees our loneliness and longing for a home, and he fulfills that himself.

For the next five devotionals, we will explore the lies of the Orphan Spirit and address the deception with the truth of how God’s Adoption brings us into his family. Like Dads on Duty, we will also explore how the message of adoption is what our generation desperately needs to see and hear.

Father, thank you for your extravagant love that chose and called me to be in your family. Reveal your love in and through me to all people. Amen.