Learning to trust

 Sanctification: The work of the Holy Spirit as He speaks to us and we surrender to the loving hand of the Father to be renewed, remade in His image, and we look to His Son, Jesus Christ for our redemption and commission.  He continually convicts, prepares us for the journey, and gives us opportunity to trust Him. The Spirit renews a person's heart, transforming their desires to be more aligned with God's.  Our desires become more and more aligned with God's as we trust Him and engage with Him.  We experience God and grow in faith; our lives look different, our countenance reflects His presence.  

Our adoption in Christ is much like our adoption of the child He brought to us.  It starts off looking frantic, and may take years of little by little trust, but if we reflect the patience of the Lord, seek His guidance through the process, and trust He is working, we will have victories to celebrate. 

Our little fledgling will in time learn, that he can rise with wings like an eagle, and soar... though he may have come to us battered, torn up, or attempting the flight of a hummingbird!  God has given us eagle's wings, to trust Him as the wind beneath our wings and soar.  You are in process: your children are in process.  God brought you together to learn how to fly.

An initial and ongoing process:

Initial (Definitive): At the moment of salvation, believers are declared holy and are fully cleansed from sin through faith in Jesus Christ. This is a one-time event.  Just as the day we went to court and signed the papers for our adoptions, just as our wedding day, when we spoke those words of covenant.

Ongoing (Progressive):  The Holy Spirit was active in your life before you knew Him.  He was in the pursuit of you since the moment you were born: protecting you from greater harms and constantly trying to make Himself known.  Following initial salvation, there is a lifelong process of growing in holiness, which involves consciously putting off sinful habits, or the ways we learned to cope, and putting on new, Christlike virtues. This process is also called "growing in grace".  As we grow, we reflect these virtues and the Holy Spirit's fruit is evident.     

We must recognize that our child "becoming", is also an ongoing process. When we take in the orphaned child, we have often gone through a sort of trial or pursuing period:  fostering, the initial placement and the time leading up to that final court signing.  When we give the child our last name, we have entered into the unbreakable covenant, but have not yet reached the apex of that covenant.  What is the apex?  It looks like sanctification.  Trust, upon trust, exercising what we hope for, believed would become, and continuing to stand on the promises we made and we believe God called us to and covers us through.  In time, our children also will reflect a life-change. 

The goal of becoming more Christlike:
The ultimate aim is to become more like Jesus in heart, mind, and action. This is an aspiration that continues until the final stage of glorification, when believers are made perfectly holy in the future.  In a similar way, as we bond with our spouse, we become more "one".  And when we bond with our child, he/she takes on more and more of what it means to be a (insert your last name).

Motivated by love, not law:
Sanctification is not about earning salvation through works but is motivated by a loving desire to obey God's will, because a person is already saved by grace through faith.  When we married, though we may not yet have identified many faults, there was an understanding of imperfection.  When we adopted that child, there was an understanding that they would go through many stages of bonding, including rebellion, or let me break that to you now.  This is sanctification in our earthly way of understanding it, and no wonder that marriage and adoption are repeatedly used throughout the bible to help us understand our relationship with God.

So as we remember this, and we look at our "defiant" child, or our child that still doesn't trust us for the next meal, remember that it's a process.  That we will have to cross many bridges together, holding out our outstretched hand, sometimes demanding that they take it, so that they will eventually come to know they can trust us, and that we will never leave nor forsake them.    Likewise, it is through this process, that we must also acknowledge and hold God's outstretched hand to us, that He still is, in the middle of what looks bleak, and He will get us through.  It is our life lived out before our kids, one hand stretched out to them, the other to our Heavenly Father, that will be the legacy that will break generational strongholds that comes with not trusting .  May our lives be lived in such a way that when they leave our nest, they know they fly with the Lord, because they have learned to walk with Him- with us.  

May we proclaim together, "The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth.  He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom.  He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak.  Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength.  They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint."  Isaiah 40:28-31.