What thoughts go through your mind in 2023?  Many of us approach another new year already weighed down with the same set of struggles we have wrestled with before.  I know that I often experience certain worries and concerns that repeat themselves over and over again.  We can wonder whether hope or change are possible, or if the new year will simply be a continuation of the challenges of this past year.

Recently I have been reflecting on the biblical principle of adoption.  God uses this language to describe how He brings people into a right relationship with Himself where we become His sons and daughters.  This truth has given me new hope in 2023. 

In one sense, God only has one Son—His own Son, Jesus Christ.  Jesus is unique and totally different from us.  He is holy and perfect in countless ways we are not.  Yet God’s plan of redemption has always been to expand the love between God the Father and God the Son and allow this love to bubble over and include a whole host of human beings.  The Apostle John describes this group of people as “a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” (Revelation 7:9).  The Apostle Paul summarizes God’s plan of redemption this way in Romans 8:29, “For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he [Christ] might be the firstborn among many brothers [and sisters].”   Here the “great multitude that no one could number” is described as “many brothers and sisters.”   In other words, God is in the process of creating a new family with many children.

How does this take place?  Paul explains it as taking place through adoption in Ephesians 1:3-6, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved.”

This biblical language of adoption can give us fresh hope as it reminds us:

• We are not by nature His children.  This is what adoption means.  We have to be adopted into His family, if we are to become His children.
• God is in control of this whole process.  He is the One who adopts.  The initiative lies with Him.
• We can become one of His children only by grace, and never through our own efforts.  Adoption, if it comes at all, comes only as a gift.  We can’t ever earn it or deserve it. 
• Yet adoption means God has specifically chosen us and made us His children.  This is a word of comfort.  What could be better than knowing that God has chosen us and we belong to Him?
• There is security here.  Jesus promised us that if God has chosen us, “no one is able to snatch [us] out of the Father’s hand” (John 10:29).
• God also promises us a glorious future.  If we are God’s “children, then [we are also] heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ” (Romans 8:17).  Regardless of how life is going for us at the moment, God wants us to live in hope and anticipation.  The day is coming when He will make all things new and right.  Remember, the best is yet to be.

This means we can trust Him to lead us, guide us, and keep us this coming year.  For me, the biblical principle of God’s adoption of His people gives me fresh hope in 2023.  My desire is to get to grow in my relationship with this God who has adopted me into His family.

But what if you don’t have this confidence, or know whether God has chosen you?  We know that the One who does the adopting does the choosing.  So ultimately the ball is always in God’s court.  God’s sovereignty is part of what it means for Him to be God.

But still there is a sense in which we are invited to cry out to Him to choose us and adopt us into His family.  This is part of what Jesus meant when He said, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.  For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened” (Matthew 7:7-8).  Spiritual interest on our part is often an indication that God is actively at work drawing us to Himself through His Spirit.  God may well be already in the process of making you one of His children.  The proof comes in how you respond.

So as we begin 2023, pursue your relationship with God as if your life depends upon it—because it does.  And as God gives you assurance that He has adopted you through being born again into a new and living relationship with God, rejoice in that hope.  Remember God’s promise that if He has begun a “good work in you,” He “will bring it to completion” (Philippians 1:6). 

Knowing God and being confident that He has adopted us for His own makes all the difference in how we enter 2023.