Adopted for Life Quotes

“In the New Testament, we don't find our gift through self-examination and introspection and then find ways to express it. Instead, we love one another, serve one another, help one another, and in so doing we see how God has equipped us to do so.”
― Russell D. Moore, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families & Churches

“If the apostles reminded even Paul himself to remember the poor (Galatians 2:10), then surely the rest of us need such a reminder.”
― Russell D. Moore, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families & Churches

“We get too comfortable with this orphanage universe, though. We sit in our pews, or behind our pulpits, knowing that our children watch "Christian" cartoons instead of slash films. We vote for the right candidates and know all the right "worldview" talking points. And we're content with the world we know, just adjusted a little for our identity as Christians. That's precisely why so many of us are so atrophied in our prayers, why our prayers rarely reach the level of "groanings too deep for words" (Rom 8:26). We are too numbed to be as frustrated as the Spirit is with the way things are.”
― Russell D. Moore, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families & Churches

“There’s something about patience that God deems necessary for our life in the age to come and so, whether through agriculture or discipleship or bodily development or eschatology or procreation, God makes us wait”
― Russell D. Moore, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families & Churches

“In the world of the Bible, one’s identity and one’s vocation are all bound up in who one’s father is. Men are called “son of” all of their lives (for instance, “the sons of Zebedee” or “Joshua, the son of Nun”). There are no guidance counselors in ancient Canaan or first-century Capernaum, helping “teenagers” decide what they want “to be” when they “grow up.” A young man watches his father, learns from him, and follows in his vocational steps. This is why “the sons of Zebedee” are right there with their father when Jesus finds them, “in their boat mending the nets” (Mark 1:19-20).

The inheritance was the engine of survival, passed from father to son, an economic pact between generations. To lose one’s inheritance was to pilfer for survival, to become someone’s slave.”
― Russell D. Moore, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families & Churches

“We don't persuade our neighbors by mimicking their angry power-protests. We persuade them by holding fast to the gospel, by explaining our increasingly odd view of marriage, and by serving the world and our neighbors around us, as our Lord does, with a towel and a foot-bucket.”
― Russell D. Moore, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families & Churches

“The root of impatience in discipline is really the same as that of overindulgence. In both instances, parents want to make up for lost time, to speed up a process that takes time.”
― Russell D. Moore, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families & Churches

“A Christian understanding of the world sees a child's character not as genetically determined but as shaped to a significant degree by parental discipleship and discipline.”
― Russell D. Moore, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families & Churches

“And we’re content with the world we know, just adjusted a little for our identities as Christians. That’s precisely why so many of us are so atrophied in our prayers, why our prayers rarely reach the level of ‘groanings too deep for words’.”
― Russell D. Moore, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families & Churches

“When my sons arrived in the family, their legal status was not ambiguous at all. They were our kids. But their wants and affections were still atrophied by a year in the orphanage. They didn't know that flies on their faces were bad. They didn't know that a strange man feeding them their first scary gulps of solid food wasn't a torturer. Life in the cribs alone must have seemed to them like freedom. That's what I was missing about the biblical doctrine of adoption. Sure it's glorious in the long run. But it sure seems like hell in the short run. . . .”
― Russell D. Moore, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families & Churches

“The demonic powers hate babies because they hate Jesus. When they destroy “the least of these” (Matthew 25:40, 45), the most vulnerable among us, they’re destroying a picture of Jesus himself.”
― Russell D. Moore, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families & Churches

“Adoption would become a priority in our churches if our churches themselves saw our brotherhood and sisterhood in the church itself rather than in our fleshly identities.”
― Russell D. Moore, Adopted for Life (Foreword by C. J. Mahaney): The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches

“Without the theological aspect, the emphasis on adoption too easily is seen as mere charity. Without the missional aspect, the doctrine of adoption too easily is seen as mere metaphor.”
― Russell D. Moore, Adopted for Life (Foreword by C. J. Mahaney): The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches

“When we adopt—and when we encourage a culture of adoption in our churches and communities—we’re picturing something that’s true about our God. We, like Jesus, see what our Father is doing and do likewise (John 5:19). And what our Father is doing, it turns out, is fighting for orphans, making them sons and daughters.”
― Russell D. Moore, Adopted for Life (Foreword by C. J. Mahaney): The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches

“Too often, our concept of pastors and church leaders reinforces rather than obliterates the sad state of family life in our current context.”
― Russell D. Moore, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families & Churches

“It’s not that Jesus is the copy of Israel coming out of Egypt, but that Israel coming out of Egypt was the copy—in advance—of Jesus.”
― Russell D. Moore, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families & Churches

“Maybe such questions bothered me so much because they are being asked about me, all the time, within the echo chamber of my own fallen psyche and by unseen rebel angels all around. Are you really a son of the living God? Does your God really know you? Does this biblical story really belong to you? Are these really your brothers and sisters? Do you really belong here?…”
― Russell D. Moore, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families & Churches

“All believers in Christ, the Scripture teaches, will suffer-all of us. You will be glorified, Paul says, if you suffer with him. The problem with too many of us is not that we don't suffer, but that we assume that only Third World Christians or heroic missionaries are suffering. My boys didn't know that they were suffering in Russia; they would feel it as suffering now.”
― Russell D. Moore, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families & Churches

“The whole universe is now an orphanage. But then there's Jesus. When we were still orphans, Christ became a substitute orphan for us. Though he was a son, he took on the humiliation of a slave and the horror of death.”
― Russell D. Moore, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families & Churches

“When we find our identity anywhere other than Christ, our churches will be made up of warring partisans rather than loving siblings.”
― Russell D. Moore, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families & Churches

“I placed my hand on both of their heads and said, knowing they couldn’t understand a word of English, “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.” I don’t think I consciously intended to cite Jesus’ words to his disciples in John 14:18; it just seemed like the only thing worth saying at the time.”
― Russell D. Moore, Adopted for Life (Foreword by C. J. Mahaney): The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches

“It is one thing when the culture doesn’t “get” adoption. What else could one expect when all of life is seen as the quest of “selfish genes” for survival? It is one thing when the culture doesn’t “get” adoption and so speaks of buying a cat as “adopting” a pet.”
― Russell D. Moore, Adopted for Life (Foreword by C. J. Mahaney): The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches

“We know, then, what human father-hood ought to look like on the basis of how our Father God behaves toward us. But the reverse is also true. We see something of the way our God is fatherly toward us through our relationships with human fathers.”
― Russell D. Moore, Adopted for Life (Foreword by C. J. Mahaney): The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches

“In caring for orphans and widows, Christians should work for justice on the international scene at both the macro and micro levels.”
― Russell D. Moore, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families & Churches

“Do you want most of all to be parents, or do you want most of all to be conservators of your genetic material?”
― Russell D. Moore, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families & Churches

“We must insist on the church as a household, not as a collection of family units.”
― Russell D. Moore, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families & Churches

“We're ashamed to think of ourselves as adopted, because to do so would focus our minds on the gory truth that all of us in Christ, like my sons, once were lost but now we're found, once were strangers and now we're children, once were slaves and now we're heirs.”
― Russell D. Moore, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families & Churches

“The contemporary Planned Parenthood movement was started by a woman named Margaret Sanger, who defended abortion rights on the basis of eugenics, the search for “good genes” based on the racist and evolutionary notions of “social Darwinism” prevalent in her day.”
― Russell D. Moore, Adopted for Life (Foreword by C. J. Mahaney): The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches

“In you the orphan finds mercy” (Hos. 14:3).”
― Russell D. Moore, Adopted for Life (Foreword by C. J. Mahaney): The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches

“Children disrupt plans, and blessedly so. They might disrupt yours. It’s easy to resent this disruption and lash out against it, perhaps not in murder but in the anger that’s the root of murder (Matt. 5:21–22).”
― Russell D. Moore, Adopted for Life (Foreword by C. J. Mahaney): The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches