This coming weekend comes with many different forms of celebration. Some will spend their time celebrating new life, other’s family, others will share in fantastical tales of bunnies and eggs. Still, others will find themselves at the bottom of a chocolate induced coma.

I hope to spend time acknowledging that Easter is the source of my faith and processing how it actually is the culmination of the greatest adoption story ever. It seeks to end the age-old question of belonging. No matter where you come from, whether you came as a group or find yourself totally alone, the Cross and Jesus’s resurrection is the final word in our story of belonging.

Adam and Eve started the process of disconnection with each other, people in general and God. Their actions in the garden of Eden seem for many to be the deathblow to wholeness. But God…

I find it difficult to understand the ease at which we fill our lives and dare I say it, church services, with notices, songs, calls to tithe, messages, coffee, random important stuff, etc and yet the one aspect that underpins our entire foundation as believers is overlooked. This one aspect was borne in the mind of God from the beginning of time and long before Adam, Eve, serpents and trees muddied the water of our lives and our connection with our Father God.

I can imagine, albeit comically, how God was looking through time and saw the hiccup we would later refer to as “The Fall”. As if we get to prescribe permanence to our failings.

I can see Him creating a plan to restore us into His family after we opted out. I wonder why He did it, why He felt we were deserving? But then  I lift my eyes and see my children, I see them playing, making mistakes, making good choices, smiling, stumbling and fumbling. What I see most is that they are mine and no amount of mess could ever stand between them and me. I see myself thinking of ways to restore them, bringing them back into connection with me. So if this is something I would do, just imagine the lengths God can and has gone to restore us.

That process is adoption. We chose to sin, He chose adoption. We chose ourselves, He chose adoption. We chose satisfaction and temporary enjoyment, He chose adoption. With every choice we made to extend the distance between us and Him, he simply kept reaching back and drawing us to Himself through the power of adoption. Adoption is that powerful!

It covers sin, it resurrects hopes, it includes, it translates it crashes through borders and reaches into impossible spaces. Adoption makes it possible to alter the past, present and future and it makes it possible for people who opted out of Gods family, to find their way back into the house of their Dad.

We celebrate Christmas, the Manger, the baby Jesus, and so we should. But I find it sad that we often treat Easter as a second rate Christian celebration which seeks to thank God for all he has done, but as an afterthought to the main event of a normal Sunday Service.

Easter is the reason we have a faith, it is the sum total of who we are in Him, it is the beginning and end of Gods endgame. He took it upon himself to pay the price, dying as a man for our sins, rising on the third day as God and declaring once and for all that our sins will never ever be counted against those who accept this free gift of salvation. Jesus’s sacrifice settled once and for all the question of payment for wrongs committed, past, present and future. How was this made possible? How could His death and payment of the price of sin result in us coming home?

The answer is adoption! Adoption seeks to take someone that was disconnected and provide a home, provide healing, provide identity and belonging. We were cleansed by the healing power of the cross, but it was our adoption into God’s family that made it possible for us to become heirs with Christ, and in this way, we experience the divine exchange. All of His works for all of ours!

So this Easter weekend, let’s enjoy family, let’s pray that the eggs are calorie free and let’s appreciate new life. But let those things be seen in the context of a Great love, the love of a Father, expressed through the sacrifice of a son and made complete through our adoption into His family.

And when we see that the foundation of the Christian faith finds it’s expression in adoption, we need to answer the next question. That question asks why we are happy to receive this gift, all expenses paid, but we struggle with extending such a gift to children in the natural. I believe we should all be asking ourselves, “If it was done for me, shouldn’t I do it for another?”.

HAPPY EASTER!!