About 135,000 children are adopted each year in the United States. Of those 135,000, 59 percent are from the foster care system, 26 percent are from other countries and 15 percent are voluntarily relinquished for adoption. According to the 2014 adoption statistics, 50,644 children were adopted from the foster care system. There are over 100,000 still waiting to be adopted each year. The average age of those waiting for adoption, for a home, is 7 years. Say what you will about the system, but there is a great need for adoption. There would be an even greater need if mothers would choose adoption over abortion.
Did you know that you have been adopted? God’s message to us is that we are adopted and heirs. “For all who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God. For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, ‘Abba! Father!’ The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, heirs also, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him so that we may also be glorified with Him” (Rom. 8:14-17). The New Testament refers to those who are obedient to God through Christ as children. Did you ever stop to think how we are His children? We are not like the Christ who dwelt with Him from the beginning. God does not refer to us as the firstborn. We are His through adoption because of the sacrifice of Jesus. We are not children by birth, as those that were born through Abraham, but rather children of promise (Rom. 9:8). As Hosea prophesied, “Yet the number of the sons of Israel Will be like the sand of the sea, Which cannot be measured or numbered; And in the place Where it is said to them, ‘You are not My people,’ It will be said to them, ‘You are the sons of the living God’” (1:10).
Consider this when you read “children of God.” It is referring to you as adopted. Not only adopted but adopted with an inheritance. God says that we are co-heirs with Christ, that we will be glorified with Him, and that we are siblings of the Jesus through faith and obedience to God. “See how great a love the Father has bestowed on us, that we would be called children of God; and such we are. For this reason the world does not know us, because it did not know Him. Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not appeared as yet what we will be. We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is…By this the children of God and the children of the devil are obvious: anyone who does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor the one who does not love his brother” (1 John 3:1-2, 10).
You are children and heirs of God. There is a great need for this adoption. Tell the world they have a Father.