Not to overstate the obvious, but tomorrow is Christmas, which means that long before it is light out, children will be scampering out of bed in the wee hours of the morning with the anticipation of opening presents. They will awake to find piles of presents under the Christmas tree and begin meticulously searching for those gifts which are labeled with their name. Perhaps the wrapped presents hold that new doll or video game they asked for. When their parents finally drag themselves out of bed or are forcibly dragged out of bed, the excitement of actually opening the gifts will begin. Oohs and Aahs, and thank you’s will be exchanged as gifts from parents, siblings, grandparents, and friends are revealed. A few hours later, with presents and wrapping paper strewn across the room, these children will sit down with the rest of their family to the traditional Christmas dinner; All of which is followed by everyone’s favorite, Christmas pie smothered in whipped cream.

But what if Christmas meant none of this? For some children, that is exactly the case; Christmas simply does not exist. There are no nicely wrapped presents, no Christmas dinner or Christmas pie, and even worse, no family. That was the plight of Anastasia Federovna and Anastasia Guseva in orphanages in St. Petersburg, Russia. While their orphanages were not the typical rundown Russian orphanages that may come to mind or as bad as the orphanage many of us saw in Ukraine, Christmas was not a family holiday because there was no family. While Christmas may have brought better food for a day and maybe a small gift from caring orphanage workers, there was no pile of presents and the joy on parent’s faces as gifts were revealed and children shouted with excitement. Christmas was simply a mark on the calendar, another day without family.

The case was far worse for Hon Yoe Way and Kong Shoe Chin in China. There was no loving family, in fact their names were not even their birth names, but the names of the places where they had been found abandoned. Living in an orphanage with a 90% mortality rate, Christmas was not just another day, but another struggle for survival. With children placed three to a crib, Christmas was a day spent hoping that one of the other two children in the crib did not contract a contagious fatal disease. There was no Christmas dinner, aside from the food scraps placed in the cribs.  There were no presents or toys, no Christmas tree, in fact, there wasn’t even a door to the orphanage to keep out the snow. Imagine waking up on Christmas morning to a bitter sense of hopelessness. And yet, for these children, that was Christmas, another day on the calendar without family, without hope.

In a country as blessed as America we take Christmas for granted, not realizing that much of the world’s population goes without. Even more, we fail to realize that there was a time when we ourselves we just like the two little Anastasia’s in Russia and Hon Yoe Way and Kong Shoe Chin sharing a disease ridden crib in China. There was a time when we too were alienated and separated from a loving family. Paul writes in Ephesians that “we were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind,” And again in Ephesians 2 “Remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.” We were sinful fallen human beings, alienated from the family of God. We were all like outcasts and orphans out on the street peeking in through windows. We were without a loving family, and worse, without hope.

And it is in that context that Paul wrote the passage before us today. To a group of people separated and alienated from God by sin he writes beginning at the end of verse 4: “In love He predestined us for adoption 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.” Paul gives us as sons and daughters of unrighteousness the same hope he gave the church in Ephesus: Because our sin alienated and separated from God, God predestined us for adoption. Christmas is not just another day on the calendar, instead it is a reminder to us of the fact that as those who were predestined for adoption, we have a God who is a Loving Father and we have a God who is a Pleased Father; a Loving Father who chose to be pleased because of Christ and a Pleased Father who loves us because of Christ.

First, let’s look at how Paul shows that we have a Loving Father. In the first part of our passage Paul says that “In love he predestined us for adoption through Jesus Christ.” The word predestined means to determine ahead of time. This may sound like cold, heartless fatalism. Michelle and I recently became addicted to the tv show LOST. The show is about a group of people who survive a plane crash and live on some island. The problem is that the island somehow controls their lives, causing bizarre events to happen them, even killing some of them. The island has the power to predestine events, but it is a ruthless, harsh, and cold predestining.

But Paul in our passage does not present our being predestined in such a way. Instead, Paul says that we were predestined in love. This is not the predestined will of a ruthless deity; rather this is the predestined will of a loving God. In fact, Paul never uses the term predestined without placing it in the context of love. Last week Pastor Vogel led us through the first part of Romans 8, another passage in which Paul discusses our being predestined. The overall context of Romans 8 is the work of God saving us, of our having “no condemnation” for our sin. This is not the work of a heartless deity, but the work of a loving God who, in an act of mercy predestined us in love to save us from our sin.

But God does not just predestine us to save us from our sin. Paul says that “In love, [God] predestined us “for adoption.” Adoption is not uncommon in our culture. There are many people here today who are adopted; I have two adopted Korean sisters. It simply means to bring someone into your family who was not born into it. In the Greco-Roman culture in which Paul wrote, wealthy people who did not have an heir to leave their wealth to would adopt a person, oftentimes a slave or servant, into their family to become their heir. This is the idea that Paul has in mind here. We were not originally born as members of God’s family, instead we were alienated and separated from God’s family by our sin. But God in His love predestined us not only to save us from sin but to be adopted. God predestined us in love to bring us out of our cruel slavery to sin into God’s loving family.

And it is within this context of adoption that being predestined makes sense. We do not have establishments called “Barrenages” which house couples without children where orphans go to select their parents; we have orphanages which house orphans where couples who desire children will go and select a child. Or as Pastor Vogel mentioned two weeks ago, we do not have unwanted unborn children indicate who they want to adopt them. That would simply be ridiculous. It is the parents who adopt the child before it is even born. It is the parents who make the decision and the determination, not the child. The entire process of adoption rests on the will and choice of the one doing the adopting, not on the will of the child being adopted. The same is true of our adoption into God’s family. It lies not on the basis of our will, but on the predestined and predetermined will of our Loving Father.

I mentioned before that I have two adopted Korean sisters. No one would ever accuse my parents of harshly and cruelly forcing their will onto my helpless sisters. Instead, we understand the love and care with which my parents decide to adopt two girls who would have otherwise been raised as orphans. In the same way, our Loving Heavenly Father has adopted us, bringing us from the outside as orphans into His loving, caring family. We now have a God who is our Loving Father, having been predestined in love for adoption as His sons and daughters.

What difference does it make now that we have a Loving Father? It means we are no longer orphans. When trouble comes or circumstances get tough, orphans respond in one of two ways. They either give up, curl into the fetal position in some forgotten corner, and slowly die or they fight back, scratching or clawing in a kill or be killed struggle. But we are no longer orphans, we are children of a Loving Father. When circumstances get rough, when our spouses do not act towards us as we think they should, bosses treat us unjustly, our children rebel against us, the car breaks, and the entire world seems out to get us, we must remember that we are children of a Loving Father. We do not act as orphans. We don’t give up, throw in our towel, and sit in some dark place and cry believing it will never get better. And we don’t respond as though our survival depended on us. We don’t fight back at our spouse or boss, taking what we believe we have to like a child in a crib fighting with two other children for the only blanket knowing survival depends on it. Instead, we take confidence knowing that God is our Loving Father, knowing that He is watching over us and is in control over all things. We take confidence knowing that nothing, not the actions of others or disaster in our lives can affect the Love which God has poured out on us in Christ. And so, instead of responding as orphans as though our survival depended on us, we can cry out to God as our Loving Father, knowing that our survival rests in Him. He is our Loving Father, a Father who has adopted us, watches over us, and cares for us. He will take care of us, as a Father watches over his children.

Paul says that not only do we have a Loving Father, we have a Pleased Father. Those may sound like identical ideas, but they are actually dependent on one another. God in His love is pleased with us in Christ. Because God is pleased with us in Christ, God loves us. Let’s look at this idea of being pleased. Paul in our passage writes that we have been predestined for adoption 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.  These other phrases all serve to give the same idea: Our adoption is something which our loving Father was pleased to do because He was pleased in Christ. Our Loving Father was pleased to adopt us because he was pleased in Christ.

This first mention of being pleased shows up when Paul says that God adopted us “according to the purpose of his will.” This phrase “purpose of his will” indicates a definite intentionality but carries also the idea of pleasure or enjoyment. We see the exact same word in the Christmas story when we say “goodwill” to all men. The New American Standard translates the occurrence here in Ephesians as “the kind intention of his will.” Again, the idea is of the purpose of God’s will, but also of the desire of his will. God’s decision is not random and neither was God forced or coerced to predestine us for adoption. Instead, God predestined us for adoption because he desired to do so; He was pleased to do so. 

Why was God pleased to adopt us? Paul answers that in the next phrase “to the praise of his glorious grace.” Above all, God’s motivation and desire are for His own glory, the glory of His grace. Our being adopted does not lie in who we are, but in who God is. God is gracious and demonstrated this by adopting us even when we did not deserve it. Grace by definition is something which is given but not deserved. We did nothing to cause God to adopt us; actually, we did plenty to cause him not to adopt us, but he adopted us anyway. because that is what grace is, unconditional and undeserved, like a Christmas present. Tomorrow we will open gifts by the hundreds, not earned, not deserved, but given nonetheless. We may joke and tease about how kids deserve coal, but come Christmas day, what do they get? “gifts.” I can remember growing up next door to one of the most disobedient kids I have every met; he was always getting in trouble. And yet, come Christmas morning he had the latest, newest, and coolest toys. Did he deserve them? Absolutely not. Did he earn them? Of course not, but his parents graced him with them anyway, because they desired to do so, because of who they were, not because of who their child was, just as God has done for us. We did not earn adoption, deserve adoption, or have any hope of adoption, but God was pleased to adopt us anyway to bring glory to His grace.

But Paul tells us that God was not just pleased to adopt us, in the sense that he desired it, God’s adoption of us also required that He be pleased with us. God’s righteous justice requires that all of His children be perfect, and I don’t think it takes us too long to discover we don’t fit into that category. To address that dilemma, Paul makes it clear  that our Pleased Father not only took pleasure in adopting us, and our Pleased Father is pleased with us in Christ. He says that God has blessed us, literally graced us, with his grace “in the Beloved.” Not in “a beloved” but in “The Beloved, Jesus Christ.” We’ve seen it over and over again, from our being blessed in Christ in verse 3 and our being elected in Christ in verse 4, as we will see throughout the rest of this first chapter of Ephesians, the entire process of our salvation occurs by our being “in Christ.” God is not pleased to adopt us because He is pleased with us; He is pleased to adopt us because He is pleased with Christ and where are we? IN Christ!  Christ’s perfection is our perfection. His righteousness is our righteousness. We stand before God, not only as holy and blameless, but as his holy and blameless children, cleansed and adopted in Jesus Christ. It is here that our earthly picture of adoption breaks down. God is an adoptive parent who adopted His children because He was pleased with their older brother. That would be like my parents adopting my sisters because of how much they liked me. I’m sure my sisters would adamantly deny that! But that is exactly what God has done. He has adopted us because He was pleased with someone else. He was pleased with Christ.

But that also means that God continues to be pleased with us. Nothing we do as His children affects how Pleased He is with us and how much He loves us because our adoption was never rooted in what we did, it is founded IN Christ. In order for God to be displeased with me or stop loving me, He would have to stop loving Christ. And that’s impossible. God cannot stop Loving “The Beloved.” And we are all beloveds because we are in “The Beloved.” God loves us because He loves Christ. God is Pleased with us because He is pleased with Christ.

So what if sometimes I do still act like orphan. What if sometimes I forget that I don’t have to fight for my own survival or I give up and cry in a corner? What if sometimes I fight back with my spouse or boss or children, determined to get what is rightfully mine? Does that change whether or not God Loves me or is Pleased with me? Absolutely not!

Craig Barnes, pastor of National Presbyterian Church in Washington, DC tells this story “When I was a child, my minister father brought home a 12-year-old boy named Roger, whose parents had died from a drug overdose. There was no one to care for Roger, so my folks decided they'd just raise him as if he were one of their own sons. At first it was quite difficult for Roger to adjust to his new home—an environment free of heroine-addicted adults! Every day, several times a day, I heard my parents saying to Roger:

"No, no. That's not how we behave in this family."

"No, no. You don't have to scream or fight or hurt other people to get what you want."

"No, no, Roger, we expect you to show respect in this family." And in time Roger began to change. Now, did Roger have to make all those changes in order to become a part of the family? No. He was made a part of the family simply by the grace of my father. But did he then have to do a lot of hard work because he was in the family? You bet he did. It was tough for him to change, and he had to work at it. But he was motivated by gratitude for the incredible love he had received.

Do you have a lot of hard work to do now that the Spirit has adopted you into God's family? Certainly. But not in order to become a son or a daughter of the heavenly Father. No, you make those changes because you are a son or daughter, not making those changes in your own power, but with the Holy Spirit, God’s power at work in you to behave like the adopted child of God you are. And every time you start to revert back to the old addictions to sin, the Holy Spirit will say to you, "No, no. That's not how we act in this family."

Being the child of a Loving Father means we no longer have to act like orphans, and being the children of a Pleased Father means we that even when we do act like orphans, we know He still loves us, not because of us, but because we are in Christ.

In 1996, two American couples traveled to Russia and to China. Both couples were not childless. In fact, the couple in Russia had a biological son while the other couple headed to China had two biological children, a son and a daughter. Yet, both couples desired to adopt international children. In Russia, the two little Anastasias were greeted by loving adopting parents, as were Hon Yoe Way and Kong Shoe Chin in China. And with their new position as adopted children came new names. Left with the prospect of two children with the name Anastasia, the first couple chose to split the girl’s names in half, giving one girl the name Ana and the other the name Tasha. Hon Yoe Way was given the name Joseph and Kong Shoe Chin was given the name Anna. Finally, all four were given new family names. Anna and Tasha were given their parents’ last name: Slaber, while Joey and Anna were given their new parents’ last names: Beyer.

For Anna and Tasha Slaber and Joey and Anna Beyer, Christmas means something different than just a great holiday. Each Christmas is a reminder of a time when Christmas marked just another struggle for survival. But tomorrow, like so many other children, these four Cornerstone teens will enjoy the warmth of a family at Christmas, a family that chose to adopt them. They now have the confidence of knowing that they have loving parents who care for them and love them unconditionally.

What about you? As we sit here today, is tomorrow just another holiday, another excuse to eat a lot and give gifts? Or, do you realize that there was a time when you too were an outsider, excluded, alienated, and separated from the family of God. But now, by being predestined for adoption you are a child of God in Christ who should know they have a Loving Father and a Pleased Father. We aren’t orphans, we are children of God.