“God’s massive, cosmic story of adoption IS the real world” –Dan Cruver
Dan Cruver is the director of Together for Adoption and author of Reclaiming Adoption.
What does God really want from you?
Wow, isn’t this a question that I am sure every believer has questioned throughout their life.
Here are some verses to consider:
But does that “sum up” what God wants from us? Here are some other verses…
Is it one or the other? Absolutely NOT. Dan tells us that the question is a false question. It is NOT what does God want from you, but who is God. The answer? God is an eternal fountain.
Dan gives an incredible illustration of us trying to drink from Niagra Falls …he talks about how foolish it would be to think that we could try to diminish Niagara from our tiny, little mouths.
Dan says, “God is an eternal fountain of love that is, by nature, a giver….We can’t live the Christian life well, if we think of God as primarily wanting from us.”
What does this mean for us as we care for orphans? Here are Dan’s 4 main points:
1. There is a strong connection in this Psalm to what Scripture calls
Sonship. Sonship means that we are GIVEN all the rights and privileges of THE Son (Jesus!) through adoption (chew on that for a bit!!)
2. Drinking from the fountain of the Father’s lavish delight in us
actually empowers us to live on the razor sharp edge of the world’s
profound brokenness.
3. Orphans need Christians who feast on the abundance of God’s
house and whom God causes to drink from the river of his delights
(Psalm 36:8 ).
4. Christians who experience God the Giver are much better equipped
Who is the God who GIVES? Psalm 36:8 gives us that answer. Psalm 36 is talking about God’s steadfast love and tells us that we are able to drink from the river of God
We are given the river of God
Dan makes the point that this eternal river of God
[sidebar…what is going to follow is going to be tricky to explain in a blog post…Christians will get it because we’ve read, studied it for a while, but my dear friends who read my blog who are still questioning Christianity, I promise this isn’t freaky sci-fi stuff, it is such a beautiful truth once you understand it....we might need to grab a cup of coffee and talk more about this in person. I’ll post Dan’s video clip on this once it’s up on the website, because he explains it so beautifully!]
Ok, so how does God’s love flow eternally? Through the trinity. God is 3 persons, but 1 God. He has ALWAYS been 3 persons and ALWAYS will be 3 persons, but he is without a DOUBT 1 God (we see it everywhere in scripture). God has ALWAYS, for all eternity,even before creation, had this perfect love that was flowing between the Father and the Son.
And then God created! He made Adam and Eve and they drank from this perfect love, this fountain of living water! They communed perfectly with God almighty.
But they turned against God. Walked away from his eternal, perfect love. And the penalty for this was death. Because of this, humanities’ ability to participate in this great LOVE, to drink from this incredible fountain of LIFE has been severed. We are cut off. But GOD…who is RICH in mercy and steadfast love…made us ALIVE in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 2 ).
What God did was sacrifice HIS son…he ruptured this perfect love that had flowed between himself and the Son for ALL eternity, SO THAT we could be brought back in to this family of God!
This is a precious, incredible truth. Like I said in my talk on Gospel Suffering yesterday, we do NOT understand God’s love for us, because we do NOT understand God’s love for his SON. OH, if only we knew the DEPTHS of God’s love for Jesus, we would be broken by the reality that he sacrificed that perfect flowing river of love in order to bring us, wretched sinners, into his eternal family. What a glorious God we serve!
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