In Christ, Pastor David Klak, STS A Message
from the Pastor:
June 2010
Our family has grown once again.
(No, for those of you wondering and waiting, I am not talking about
another baby being born anytime soon!)
We’ve recently ‘adopted’ a new kitten – we’ve named her “Mabel,” after a
member of our congregation, Mabel Winkelmann, whose cat had another litter and
from which we have received this gift.
We thank Mable W. so much for this little kitten!
Mabel, the kitty, has been such a
delight to Jillian and Jackson and Lila.
They just love to chase her, pet her, play with her. They’re always
concerned where she is, what she is doing, how she is.
When she first arrived, she was, of course, scared with her new
surroundings and all these new people.
But soon she warmed up to us, and once she realized she was well taken
care of, fed, played with, petted, she has begun returning the affection with
her little claws and teeth playfully nibbling on those toys also known as
“toes.” In just a few short days,
she has begun to live out her role as a new family member.
She was adopted by us, and we loved her immediately; in time she began
responding in love to that adoption and is now
quite
at home (with our shoes, furniture, curtains, etc).
It’s so natural now it is as if she was always
meant
to be in our family.
Just as Mabel has been adopted into our
family and now receives (inherits) all the benefits that go with it (love,
attention, even, ummm, scolding), we too have been adopted by our God and Father
through the wonderful and mysterious work of His Son, Jesus Christ.
As St. Paul writes in his letter to the Ephesians:
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, just as he chose us
in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him
in love. He destined us for adoption
as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his
will, to the praise of his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in the
Beloved. (Ephesians 1:3-6)
Two things I find striking in this
paragraph (there are more, but two for now is enough): 1) He has
freely chosen us, that is adopted us, through
his Grace and love and lavished his graces and goodwill upon us; and 2) He did
all this even “before the foundation of the world,” before we were even born,
even knowing all that we would do and say and think and so forth.
Like any child, even us adopted
children, we are loved unconditionally by our Father in heaven, and forgiven
unconditionally through the merits of Christ, and are established as “holy and
blameless before him in love.” That
doesn’t mean we don’t get scolded from time to time; it doesn’t mean we don’t
endure the consequences of our actions, punishment in other words, for our sins.
But it does mean that even in those trials, temptations, and spiritual
‘time-outs,’ so to say, we know that we are His, that as His sons and daughters
we are loved forever and fully from now until eternity.
It is because of this reality we can live in a way in which we are not
stuck in our failings, but reach out to one another in love and compassion that
is worthy of the dignity we have as heirs of the kingdom.
We love because He first loved us (1 John 4:19); we live because He lives
(John 14:19). In Christ, we become
in practice what we are in position – children of the heavenly Father.
This is the fruit of our justification, it is the root of our
sanctification: living the life of beloved sons and daughters of the Most High,
our Father.
In Christ, Pastor David Klak, STS