New Life for Your Adopted Child

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In this episode, our host, a passionate adoption advocate and pastor, invites listeners to explore how an adopted child's early experiences shape their spirit. and how faithful families can become restorative homes. Drawing on scripture, research, and prayer, he explains that the womb is not just a place of growth, but a place of emotional imprinting, and that the deep wounds children arrive with can be transformed by God's love. He shares practical steps from intentional gentile communication to the power of consistent prayer. honesty about adoption and cultivating a loving, safe environment that help heal broken hearts and foster belonging. Listeners will leave with tangible tools and a deeper trust that God can turn even the most wounded spirit into a vibrant, loving child. Let's dive in and hear about some faith that's fresh, wisdom that lasts.

Psalm 10. 14 says, "Thou art the helper of the fatherless." And Psalm 68:es 5 and 6, "A father of the fatherless is God in his holy habitation. God said of the solitary and families." In Luke 4:18, Jesus says, "He have sent me to heal the brokenhearted." Many new adoptive parents, while wellprepared and eager to love and nurture their long-awaited child and to provide bountifully for him or her have not at all comprehended what can be the depth and the intensity of the brokenheartedness in that little one. And though they may have good solid faith in the power of the Lord to bless and to heal, they can fall short of communicating that love to the spirit of a child so as to affect real healing. Many many parents have come to us saying, "I know that my baby needs affection, and I want to hold him. I want to rock him, but he won't let me. He just stiffens in my arms." Or some say, "My toddler seems to want comfort and love and will come crying to me, but when I pick her up, she just pushes me away." Or some report, "This child that I have is insatiable. He has to be held all the time. He can never get enough. Then we hear of older adopted children putting their parents through endless rounds of testing as though to say, "If I do this, will you still love me?" They reject before they can be rejected, punished by failure to achieve. Or they may go to the other extreme and strive and strive to please. And when they please, is they're never able to come to rest in the affirmation of family and teachers. They may refuse affection and then project onto parents who have given consistent unconditional love the accusation you don't love me. Such children may steal items they have no need of simply to get attention or to express some unidentified sense of having themselves been robbed and their need to retaliate or fill the emptiness. They may lie for no explained reason and to affect no practical purpose. Parents cry out in desperation, "Where did we go wrong? Maybe we weren't cut out to be parents." They need to know that all such attitudes and behavior in their adopted children can be summed up as the message in the latter part of Psalm 109:22. to deliver me for I am afflicted and needy and my heart is wounded within me. Adopted parents need to realize that their child came to them deeply wounded. They should not interpret the manifestations of that woundedness as conclusive evidence of their failure as parents. This does not mean resignation to painful endurance. The brokenhearted can be healed and the depth of their woundedness can become the strength of their compassion and sensitivity for others. First, there is the need for the adoptive parent to understand something of the origin, the nature, and the functions of a person's personal spirit. Job 32:8 tells us, "It is the spirit in a man, the breath of the Almighty, that gives understanding. As we mature, we interpret experiences with our mind. But before we have a developed intellect with which to reason, we have a spirit within us. As soon as we begin to form within the womb, that breath from God, which is the core of the essence of us, is breathed into us or we wouldn't have life at all. We read in James 2:26, the body without the spirit is dead. And in Ecclesiastes 12:7, the spirit shall return unto God gave it. The spirit that is our personal spirit according to the word of God is capable of experiencing and expressing many many things. Troubledness John 13:21 distress Acts 17:16 fear Romans 8:16-1 17 longing Isaiah 26:9 our spirit testifies Romans 8 16 and 17 praise 1 Corinthians 14:14 sings 1 Corinthians 14:15 praises 1 Corinthians 14:16 tends toward envy James 4:5 expresses faithfulness or unfaithfulness Psalm 78:8 and worships John 4:23 in Luke 1:41-44 as soon as the sound of Elizabeth's greeting reached Mary's ears. The baby John the Baptist leaped in her womb for joy. Scripture tells us that we also sin in our spirit and in whose spirit is no deceit. Psalm 32. Create in me a clean heart, oh God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Psalm 51. I will give you a new heart. and put a new spirit within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit, that is the Holy Spirit, within you. Ezekiel 36:26, Ezekiel 11:19, and Ephesians 4:1 17 and 18 all give us the same message. 2 Corinthians 7:1 says, "Let us cleanse ourselves from all defilement of flesh and spirit." That sinning in our spirit begins at our very beginnings. In Psalm 58:3, we read, "The wicked are estranged from the womb. Those who speak lies go astray from birth." And Isaiah 48:8 says very much the same thing. I knew that that you would deal very treacherously and you have been called a rebel or a transgressor from birth. Some verses say or some versions say the belly in the womb. The adopted child has experienced in his own personal spirit the rejection of his natural parents. He has absorbed all the elements of his environment. The fear tension, uncertainty, anxiety, guilt, shame, confusion, hatred, anger, pain of his mother. He has no security in being invited or nurtured or supported in love or welcomed into the world. Before he sees the light of this earth, he may be already confused about his identity. about his right to live, his belonging, and he may already have a sense of something must be wrong with me or I would have been chosen. He may already be bound with lies. I'm ugly, unlovable. I'm a burden, a threat, a mistake. I'm crud. No one will receive me. While still in the womb. He may have been reacting in your spirit with resentment. He may have been tightening up in defensiveness, punishing with aggressive anger, or withdrawing in fear or rebellion against life. Certainly, rest and trust are neither formed nor born in him. We discovered these insights into the awareness and the capacity of the child to react in utero simply by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Over 20 years of counseling, we ministered as the Lord directed and were gratified to find our perceptions and our prayers confirmed by changes in our counsel's behavior, changes that lasted. Recently, we've been delighted to find our diagnostic understandings confirmed by medical research. church. Dr. Thomas Verie, M. Dean, has written a book that we would very much recommend, The Secret Life of the Unborn Child. Summit Brooks, New York, New York, 1981, in which he reports the findings of clinical studies conducted all over the world concerning the experience of the child in uter. These many studies concur that the baby in the womb hears, experiences, learns, feels, tastes, and that all of this begins to shape his attitudes and his expectations about himself. He can sense and react not only to large undifferentiated emotions in the mother like love and hate, but also to shaded emotions such as ambivalence and ambiguity. The studies reveal that the child in uteral manifests a taste in music, responding calmly to composers such as Vivaldi and Mozart, but reacting violently to performances of Beethoven and to all kinds of rock music. I don't think that Beethoven would want to be connected with rock music, but what the author is trying to say here is that anything that has a loud drum beat in it or loud clashing symbols effects a very violent response in the child. While still in the womb, the baby learns to recognize his father's voice and to be comforted by quiet, soothing tones that reassure. On the other hand, the quarreling appearance while the child is in the womb tends to produce fearful jumping underside ized, timid, and inordinately emotionally dependent children. A chronic state of uncertainty, fear, and deep-seated anxiety is built into the child in Uther whose mother smokes, and he will react when the mother even thinks of having a cigarette. Dr. Verie relates numerous fascinating stories of prenatal memory and many cave histories in which the doctors concluded that in some way the child made decisions to react such as refusal to bond with the mother after birth because of her refusal to bond with the child before delivery. He reports concerning the formation of attitudes and personality traits as a result of prenatal or birth trauma. The book says nothing of spirit documenting only that which can be observed and evalu valuated clinically from a secular point of view. But the author does suggest love as a very powerful influence for healing. We have observed that as a child grows, he will without the transforming power of the Lord tend to interpret each succeeding experience in the light of what he has already perceived life to be and according to the way he feels about himself. His woundedness has clouded and colored the spiritual eyes. Dr. Verie's report says that a friendly or a hostile womb creates personality and character predispositions and anticipation of the outside world. The Bible says in Matthew 6:22 and 23, "The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness. Parents may give to the child lavish affection. And if it is received, it may be that their love may cover a multitude of sins, as it says in 1 Peter 4:8. But to reach the root level of a person's innermost being requires light in the person of Jesus Christ to penetrate the darkness in the heart of the one who is deeply wounded and confused. It requires truth in the person of Jesus to counteract the lies the child has accepted about himself. It requires the forgiveness of Jesus to cleanse and to heal and to enable forgiveness in the heart of the child. And it requires the power of Jesus to completely transform and to make new. The reality of Jesus affecting the spirit of the child is made possible through prayer for the innermost being of the tiny child inside the one for whom you pray. Whether you're praying for a baby or for an adult, Jesus prize is not confined to time in space dimensions. He can identify with live and he feel and transform the spirit of a person at any time past at any time present or at any time in the future. Our entire life is an open book to him. Therefore, it's a simple matter for him when we pray asking to become one with the wounded spirit of your child all the way back to the time of conception. When We pray for Jesus to make this identification. What we do is to speak directly to the inner being of the child directly to his personal spirit. The comfort, the reassurance and the affiranation of the Lord. We may pray something like this. We say to you in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ that your life is not a mistake. God made you out of the love that He is. He called you into being at the right time and the right place. He prepared a way for you and he gave his life for you. You're a privilege, not a burden. You're a joy and a delight, not a disappointment. You're not an intrusion. You belong. You're a treasure just because you are and not the what you can do. You are one of the father God's children and he delights in you and we delight in you. We go on to ask the Lord to destroy the lies the child has accepted to bring to the cross every destructive attitude, every expectation, every personality structure or habit pattern. We pray with vivid imag Seeing the Lord pouring his love all about the child, breathing a fresh breath of life into his spirit, wrapping strong welcoming arms about the child and inviting him to grow into the fullness of his own life restfully as God planned for him from the beginning. We pray that the inner child be enabled to forgive those who wounded him. We also pray that the child himself be forgiven his negative responses. We pour the healing love of Jesus into the wounded spirit like a healing balm. We ask the Lord to gift the person with a sovereign gift of trust and rest and peace and to let his entire being be integrated with wholeness and harmony as he's reconciled to being who he is where he is. Then we place the cross of Christ, the stopping place for all sin, between the child and his parents and his parents' parent all the way back through his generations, declaring that all of his inheritance be filtered through that cross. This isn't a magic. It is simply a way of putting the Lord in charge and of claiming the blessing and the protection of the Lordful one who cannot yet but later will be required to do that for himself. All descendancy of evil, every curse coming to the child through his family line must stop on that cross. We ask the Lord to hide the child in his own heart and to cast light in the eyes of any powers of darkness that might attempt to oppress or lict or prevent his lies. We stand in the Lord's authority against all such powers. Finally, we place a blessing in the name of Jesus on the child's life. We ask the Lord to melt any hardness of heart to strengthen with might in the inner man the spirit to enlighten the eyes of the heart to open doors for him to draw him to his destiny. and to place a mantle of protection on him. For the tiny baby newly arrived in your family, this is very easy to do. As you hold the baby to feed him or rock him, feed him with love and prayer again and again and again. Close friends of ours made it their ministry for years to take foster babies into their home. Most of these little ones were rigid, fearful, restless, and quality when they first arrived. But after much hugging, rocking, sweet talk, and prayer of the sort we just described, they would relax and respond beautifully and with alertness from joy, and go into adoptive poems, ready to melt into the new parents. A foster mother would talk to the tiniest baby about the joy prepared for him in his new home, and how Jesus would be going with him. Our friends adopted one such child themselves, whom the doctors had feared would be mentally retarded because of neglect and abuse and malnutrition. And the love and prayer combination affected such a miracle in that little boy that today he's a bright, healthy, and secure in love teenager. Children under Tanner spell may be tucked into bed at night with prayers. of thanksgiving for them and the blessing that they are repeated over and over till they learn from the depth of their spirit that they are cherished. Very young children may be prayed for aloud as they sleep and their spirit will hear the prayer and be gradually secured in love. Older children who manifest a wounded spirit can be sensitively drawn into conversation. about their fears and about their animosities and the source of these can be explained to them in simple terms. Invite them to participate in prayer. Ask them to voice their forgiveness and to choose lies. Beyond prayer, persist with affection. Give them the material things they need, but far more importantly, you give them You play games, do things together as a family, laugh, joke, but do not tease. You need to understand that little children do not understand teasing at all. They're literal. Don't be threatened by their questions concerning their natural appearance. Don't conceal the fact that their adoption in their spirit. They already know they're adopted. And if you don't make that known consciously, they'll feel betrayed or lied to. Guide them to compassionate understanding of why they might have been given away. Let your discipline be firm, loving, consistent, and appropriate to the trespass and to their maturity level. Compliment affirm Let your love be always unconditional. Give your child opportunity to express his feelings. Give him room to fail. And let him have the assurance that he will never, never, never lose your love. Know that you're in resurrection business, but don't wear that responsibility too heavily. God is in charge. You will make mistakes. But God is bigger than your ability to goof. You may have to repeat prayers and verbal affirmations many times. This does not indicate unfaith or mean that the first prayers were ineffective. It simply demonstrates the fact that when a little child hears the good news that he's loved, he says, "If not with his mouth, then certainly with his heart, tell me again Then tell me again, oh please tell me again until that message permeate the very fiber of his being. Someday your child will be able to say to God as we read in Psalm 139. For thou did form my inward parts. Thou did weave me in my mother's womb. I will give thanks. to thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful is thy work, and my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from thee when I was made in secret, and skillfully wrought in the depth of the earth. Thine eyes have seen my unformed substance, and in thy book they were all written, the days that were ordained for me. me when as yet there was not one of them. Search me, oh God, and know my heart. Try me and know my anxious thoughts and see if there be any hurtful way in me and lead me in the everlasting way.

Luke 4:18 Psalms 109:22 Job 32:8 James 2:26 Ecclesiastes 12:7 John 13:21 Acts 17:16 Isaiah 26:9 1 Corinthians 14:14 1 Corinthians 14:15 1 Corinthians 14:16 James 4:5 Psalms 78:8 John 4:23 Luke 1:41–44 Ezekiel 36:26 Ezekiel 11:19 Ephesians 4:1 2 Corinthians 7:1 Psalms 58:3 Isaiah 48:8 Matthew 6:22 1 Peter 4:8

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