Jesus: A God who accepts me
friend, you are an adopted child of the Jesus I know! He has chosen you from before the foundation of the world to be His and His alone. One of His favorite words to describe you is, “Mine!”.
My prayer is that my words will make your day a little brighter with the light of God’s love.
The Bible uses the word “adoption” when referring to how God sees us.
Ephesians 1:5 says, “In love, He predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will – to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves.” (NIV)
I have a very good friend who is adopted. His adoptive parents brought him home when he was a baby and he has always been so grateful for their love, but he struggled with thoughts of rejection from his birth parents. I was talking to him one night and he said: “I have dealt my whole life with the idea that my real parents rejected me. I was consumed by it. It owned me. I choose now to look at it a different way. There is something awesome about being picked by someone who has the choice to pick anybody else, but they want you.”
When my friend shared this thought, I immediately thought: THAT is the Jesus I know! God wants us! Jesus adopts children and welcomes them into His family! What a joy!
And it is joyful until we begin to think, “What about my past? What about all the times I rejected Him? What about the wasted years?”
What about them? The Jesus I know has never stopped offering His invitation. He wants you today, friend! He wants you to know that there is forgiveness for the past and hope for the future!
In the first church that Laurel and I pastored, there was a man named Mike. Mike was a tough guy. His life had been hardened by brushes with the law and an on-again-off-again battle with alcohol. As a result of his struggles, he left a trail of broken relationships behind him. Mike found Jesus and began the long process of healing.
One day another pastor came and told us that Mike had made a sculpture of etched glass for the church. I will never forget that sculpture. It was a picture born out of pain; It was Jesus with a man kneeling in front of Him. The kneeling man was clutching Jesus’ robe, with Jesus placing one hand on the top of the man’s head and the other stretching up to heaven. The inscription on the bottom of the picture said, “Jesus, friend of sinners.”
I loved observing that picture on Sunday mornings. I would watch as people would look at it and then reflect on what it reflected.
In the outstretched glass hand of Jesus was a nail mark, and People couldn’t help but touch it.
One day I watched a man named Henry, who was suffering from cancer at the time, walk up and touch the nail print with his finger. He found comfort there. One day I went up and said to him, “It’s beautiful, isn’t it, Henry?”. He agreed, “Yes, it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful because that’s me”, pointing to the kneeling man, “and that, well, that’s Jesus!”.
That’s the Jesus I know, and the Jesus I pray that you get to know as well: Jesus, the miraculous friend of sinners.
You are His miracle!
