“How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!” 1 John 3:1

While I was in Galveston with my family over July 4th my Mom and I got in an interesting conversation. Well, we got in quite a few interesting conversations, but one of them in particular has continued pestering me. There is a really old and intriguing graveyard in Galveston and I’m not sure if the bleak but somehow alluring glimpse of it was what got us going off on a tangent or if our own eccentricities pulled this conversation out of nowhere. Knowing us probably the latter, right? Anyway, the two of us were discussing how unique the child and parent relationship is in the human experience. How the unconditional love of a parent for a child is so matchless and so unique that it is difficult, if not virtually impossible to find something with which to compare it. She described to me the way her heart felt the first time she saw the two headstones of her mom and dad sitting side by side one another in the Davis-Greenlawn cemetery. The way it felt for her to be left alone in this world without any parents, the very human beings whose mutual existence brought her into this world. It sent a chill up my spine. Now, my Mom would be the first to assure you that her relationship with her parents was far from a perfect or idyllic one. It was, in fact, a very difficult and complicated relationship but still that truth didn’t shake or numb the dreadful feeling of being orphaned.

I got to thinking after Mom and I had this overly melancholy yet truly significant conversation how many of you feel or have felt orphaned. I bet there are several of you who don’t have anyone to go along with you to a really scary doctor’s appointment. I imagine there are a handful of you who have no one to share the burden of waiting months on end to hear back about what may seem to be a very daunting prognosis. And I wonder if there are even a few of you younger women who spend the entire day looking after and meeting the needs of several of your own children without the comfort of having even one of your own parents around to cheer you on and to tell you what a great parent you are.

I cannot presume to know what it is like to lose both parents or even to have inactive parents. But, I can say that over the past year or so nothing has resounded clearer to me than that sobering reality that I am officially an adult. I’m not talking about some of the superficial things that come along with getting older like getting wrinkles, I am talking about days when I’m sick as a dog here in Atlanta and I no longer have my mom around to tickle my back and bring me 7-Up, saltines and chicken noodle soup. I’ve had some moments when I want to lace up my running shoes and start sprinting back home to my Mom because I’ve finally decided that adulthood is totally overrated and the last thing I want to do is clean my kitchen. I’ve had a couple of days when my heart has been so broken that the thought of sitting on my dad’s lap or being in my mom’s embrace was the only thing I felt could really suffice. Many of those days Colin has been around to love on me but the Lord has made certain that he was gone on several of those days as well.

I can remember one week in particular several months back when I was tied to the bed with an incapacitating migraine and Colin was on a long business trip in Miami. In my misery, I had a revelation. I came to realize that at the end of the day, it really was just my Creator and me. You’re thinking to yourself, “Good night, Melissa, you majored in Biblical Studies, and you just figured this out!?!” How true it is that some theological truths can only be learned with time and experience. Anyway, the feeling of being all alone heightened the reality that ultimately God is my comforter. My doctor could only do so much and the pharmaceutical companies had all but failed me. I had some intense and providential moments that week slowly learning how to be consoled by a God who I cannot see or touch. For the first time in my life, in adulthood no less, I truly felt like a child of God. It may sound silly but every night of that week I listened to the album called Sing Over Me: Worship Songs and Lullabies (on very low volume, by the way). The most unlikely song was the one that I listened to repeatedly, “Jesus Loves Me” sung by Christy Nockels.

A make-up artist friend of mine told me the other day that she was on a photo-shoot with a young woman getting her bridal portraits taken. She relayed to me how the photographer instructed this young woman to think of her soon-to-be-husband while she was posing and the tears just started streaming down her cheeks. I feel about like that young woman did when I hear this version of “Jesus Loves Me”. I feel overtaken with emotion for some reason. Maybe it’s because the older I get the more I realize just how weak I really am and how dumbfounding it is that Jesus could really love me. Or maybe it’s because Christy sings the song with such conviction, like she means it. It’s really sweet to hear the song sung by a group of children but it’s wholly different to hear a grown woman sing it. To hear a grown person with fully developed mental faculties sing, “Yes, Jesus Loves Me”, well, it moves me. Don’t get me wrong, I love children, but when I hear a person who is fully aware of things like mortality, economic meltdowns and global catastrophes sing a song like “Yes, Jesus Loves Me” with such purity it slays me.

If you haven’t read or heard the song in a while, here are the lyrics:

Jesus loves me this I know
For the Bible tells me so
Little ones to Him belong
They are weak but he is strong

Oh, yes, Jesus loves me.
Oh, yes, Jesus loves me.
He loves me.
Yes, Jesus loves me.
For the Bible tells me so.

Pretty powerful, right? Perhaps we skipped a couple of those verses in kindergarten because I don’t remember the song being all that weighty. Maybe I was too busy eating a donut. The donuts were my favorite thing about Sunday school growing up. Yes, I was sinful at birth. The first line I love is “little ones to Him belong, they are weak but He is strong”. I like to think of “little ones” not just as young children but as you and me. I figure I have some license since in the gospel of John, Jesus addresses grown men as “little children” (John 13:33; 21:5 “children”). Lately I’ve been reading a lot about being called children of God and what the implications of this reality are during our earthly journey. This past week I came across a sermon by John Piper in April 1995 called “The Depth of Christ’s Love: Its Lavish Benefits”. He comments on this text, 1 John 3:1 and I think you’ll enjoy reading it. I was most moved by the second half.

“Not only did it cost him his Son to save us from sin and death and hell and not only were we enemies so that God had to propitiate his own righteous anger in order to save us but he went way beyond the love of rescue and the love of sacrifice and the love of clemency to his enemies. In and through all this he had a greater design. He showed us another kind of love beyond all that. He might have rescued us, sacrificed for us, forgiven us, and not gone any further. But instead he showed us another kind of love—he took us into his family. He made us to be called children of God. Don’t take this for granted. First of all, he might not have saved us at all. He might have said, “Enemies don’t deserve saving, and that’s that.” He might have said, “My Son is too precious to pay for angels, let alone humans, let alone ungodly, rebellious humans.” But he also might have said, “I will save them from hell, and forgive their sins, and give them eternal existence—on another planet, and I will communicate with them through angels.” Nothing in us, or in the nature of the world required that God would go beyond all redeeming, forgiving, rescuing, healing love to this extreme—namely, to an adopting love. A love that will not settle for a truce, or a formal gratitude, or distant planet of material pleasure, but will press all the way in to make you a child of God. A member of the family. But even that is not an adequate description of this kind of love. When John writes about our becoming children of God, he is not thinking mainly in terms of adoption. He is thinking in terms of something more profound. He is thinking of new birth. There is no human analogy to this…The love that John has in view here in 1 John 3:1 is not the love that merely takes care of paper work and adopts. That would be amazing beyond words—to be adopted into God’s family. And Paul does describe it this way. But John sees more. God does not adopt. He moves in, by his Spirit, his seed, John calls it, and imparts something of himself to us, so that we take on a family resemblance” (John Piper).

Being called a child of God is not just a metaphor.

It is who we are.

Regardless of how self-sufficient we imagine ourselves to be.

Or how old we are.

Our Father is close beside us all the way.

In our darkest and loneliest hours.

Long after our earthly parents are gone.

During a string of seemingly endless doctor’s appointments.

And at the moment we draw our very last breath.

In Christ, we are never truly orphaned.

“How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!” 1 John 3:1

That we should be called children of God.

What a wonder.

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