Adoption // Church // Sower

I’ve been thinking a lot about adoption lately. I don’t know what you know about the adoption process, but it is a lengthy, heavily regulated process. Fostering to adopt involves many home visits and is tenuous. There is always the chance of the biological parents claiming the child or the government deeming your home unfit. 

The Road:

Many times in adoption, there is a glimmer of hope: a child. But the paperwork gets held up and the child never even gets to your house. Sometimes, a person walks into church, and before the service is even over the devil has already hardened their heart so that they may hear the gospel, but they can’t receive it. 

The Rocky Soil:

Other times, the parents and children are incompatible, and the child stays for a little while, but when the child starts to act up, a failure to thrive develops. Sometimes the child is re-homed, other times the child just waits it out and when they come of age they cease contact with the adoptive family. This is like when someone hears the gospel and accepts it, but when they become a Christian, the fancy church talk, the church doctrine, or the church politics are too much for them. They become distracted from the Gospel and fail to thrive.  

The Weedy Soil: 

Sometimes, it’s up foster a child for a little while, but the birth parents come to claim them. This is like when a person claims that gospel and lives it out for a little while, but the body and fallen world to which they are born into and the devil who prowls entice them back out into the world. 

The Good Soil:

Still, other times, everything goes right and a child is adopted into a family. That child becomes a productive and active member in the family. They are treated as a genetic child and contribute to the family as if they were. They feel the full love of the family. 

Churches are homes that are trying to adopt new children into their family. The key element is unconditional positive regard, love and acceptance. Paul talks about how to confront sin within the church family: individually, then with witnesses, then to the congregation, and if none of that works, “treat them as a pagan”.

Just like a family who is trying to adopt a child does not neglect the child they are trying to adopt because they have not signed the paperwork, do not think of your own siblings in Christ as people to be ignored or rejected because they are not living in the gospel. Rather think of them and the unsaved as foster children. While there are many in people in the world, those in your sphere of influence are your foster children. It is up to you to provide a loving and safe place for them. It is your job to represent your Heavenly Father well. 

The only thing that churches can do is build a home where the children come into it feel safe, loved, and accepted. We can’t control the biological parents or the paperwork. But we can create a place where children thrive. 

This is what I think the sower and the seed is telling us: as individuals and as churches we don’t control where the seeds we sow land, but we can farm the land before we plant. We don’t control the growth. No amount of tilling will grow a seed that God hasn’t willed to grow. But if we prepare the hearts of those who we share the gospel with by creating a culture of individual and corporate love and acceptance, then there is a lot more good Soil for the seed of the Gospel to land.