The 'Abba' Cry

I am currently working my way through Russell Moore's "Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches", and to say that the Spirit is stirring my heart would be an unbelievable understatement. It is an incredible book that has driven me to tears several times already.  The book itself approaches adoption from two fronts.  The first of which is the author's personal journey of adopting two boys from Russia.  The second is how God's redemptive plan of adoption is at the very heart of the Gospel. This truth shapes (or should) the heart of the believer to the heart of the Father.  I just finished a chapter in which Moore was detailing our spiritual inheritance as 'sons of God through Christ' and how the subject of God's adoption of us should be continually breaking our hearts to the compassion and grace of God, as well as the reality of who we were and the magnificence of what our adoption really means.

 Here is an excerpt from Moore's book that I found particularly powerful:

"The Abba cry just might be the most easily misunderstood and misinterpreted aspect of the biblical revelation of our adoption.  How many of us have heard Abba described as an infant cooing out the words "Dada" or "Papa"?  This cry though, in the context of the Scriptures, is not an infantile cooing.  The Abba cry is a scream.  It's less the sound of a baby giggling up in his father's face, and more the sound of a child screaming "Daddy!" as his face is being ripped apart by a rabid bulldog.  It is primal scream theology.  The Bible tells us, "In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of His reverence" (Heb 5:7).  Jesus in the Garden of Gethesemene isn't placidly staring, straight-backe with hands against a rock, into the sky as a shaft of light beams down on his face, as in so many of our paintings and church stained-glass window artistry.  He is screaming to his Father for deliverance, to the point the at veins in his temples burst into drops of blood (Luke 22:39-44).  That's the Abba cry.  It's the scream of the crucified.

Of all the disturbing aspects of the orphanage in which we found our boys, one stands out above all the others in its horror.  It was quiet.  The place was filled with an eerie silence, quieter than the Library of Congress, despite the face that there were cribs full of babies in every room.  If you listened intently enough, you could hear the sound of gentle rocking--as babies rocked themselves back and forth in their beds.  They didn't cry because no one responded to their cries.  So they stopped.  That's dehumanizing in its horror.

The first moment I know the boys received us, in some strange and preliminary way, was the moment we walked out of the room for the last time on that first trip.  When little Maxim, now Benjamin, fell back in his crib and cried--the first time I ever heard him do it--it was because, for whatever reason, he seemed to think he'd be heard and, for whatever reason, he no longer liked the prospect of being alone in the dark.

That's where the Spirit is leading us, in Christ.  The Holy Spirit doesn't lead us to be the toothy, giddy caricature of a "Spirit-filled" Christian.  The Spirit leads us to see when we are in enemy-occupied territory, and he teaches us to rage against that machine.  We're frustrated right now when we see images of a python swallowing a pig on a nature program on television, when we see a billboard for a divorce attorney, when we hear of children swept away by a mud-slide in the Third World, when we find ourselves gossiping about an acquaintance.  The Spirit leads us to cry out with the rest of the universe, "O God, deliver us from this!  This is not how it's supposed to be!"

Needless to say, I can't put this one down.

May God stir your heart towards Him today and what He has done!