Romans 8: 12–25

Hope through Family

By Revd Lisa Kerry, Baptist Regional Minister Team Leader

Introduction

We join this passage with one of Paul’s epic ‘Therefores’! The previous part of the chapter has gloriously explained our freedom from the tyranny of sin and our inability to live by the law, by embracing our life in the Holy Spirit. He arrives at our ‘therefore’ through the beautiful language of life in the Spirit. The ‘therefore’ is full of pregnant expectation as he explains how we are to live in the light of this wonderful good news.

Verses 12–25 cover some very significant theological ground and I would be foolish to try and cover all the bases in one sermon, and you may well find it totally indigestible! So, my plan for today is that we look at two of the themes for this pivotal passage in Paul’s letter to the church in Rome. The two themes are: The Freedom of Being Family and The Hope We Hang on to.

The Freedom of Being Family

This passage is littered with the language of family. It starts with the church being addressed as brothers and sisters, reminds them that they are children of God in vv.14, 16, 17 and 18. They and we are reminded that we are to call God our father in v.15, and that we are co-heirs with Jesus. Verses 15 and 23 tells us that we are all adopted into God’s family and even creation groans with the pains of childbirth in v.22. This passage is steeped in family and it is a version of family that brings freedom and life.

Now I don’t know all of you but you may be thinking that your version of family doesn’t always feel like it brings freedom. Maybe you are feeling weighed down by your family this morning and this passage is falling on deaf ears as a result. Can I ask you to imagine for a moment a heavenly family where we are all completely ourselves and loved and accepted for who we are. In this family we are all the best version of ourselves and no-one is jostling for position or favour. Each member is secure in their place in the Father’s love and everyone inherits more than they could ever imagine. This kind of family wouldn’t make good copy for Eastenders or Coronation Street, but it is the sound of freedom!

Paul describes the family relationships that will give us this freedom.

Firstly, we all are accepted into the Father’s love. This is not a distant authoritarian relationship, but rather the intimate one that Jesus has with his heavenly father. We are encouraged to call him Abba – Father, the intimate Aramaic term for Dad. This is a life-giving relationship that brings love and healing, and it is freely offered to each one of us.

Secondly, we are co-heirs with Jesus. Just think about that for a moment. All that the Father is bestowing on his perfect Son is shared with his children – the church! All the glory that only Jesus deserves is shared out to normal people like you and me. Of course Paul reminds the Roman church and us that we also get to share the sufferings of Jesus along with the glory. When we enter into that life in the Spirit we find ourselves joined with the whole of creation longing for Jesus to be glorified and everything to be set right.

Thirdly, we are joined in pain with creation. I wonder if you ever think about yourself joined to creation like that. We often find nature and creation a place to find God and retreat from the world and its chaos. But I’m not sure I really grasp how creation might be pining, like a women longing for the pain to end and to see her baby face to face. When we see the damage climate change is doing to our planet, perhaps we get a little glimpse of that groaning. When we see the effects of earthquakes and natural disasters, maybe we hear a bit of the suffering world longing for its creator to make all things right and beautiful again.

Fourthly, we are adopted. In Roman life it was not uncommon for wealthy families to adopt people to be their sons and daughters. In fact those adopted children gained all and sometimes more of the benefits of the family name than the birth children did. So when Paul writes to the Roman church about being adopted, they are not thinking of orphaned children needing the intervention of social services – they are thinking of an honour bestowed on chosen.

My life has been bound up with adoption. When I was thirteen my parents adopted my six-year-old brother and when my husband and I had two girls, aged eight and six, we adopted an eleven-year-old. Both journeys have been marked by pain and both have involved taking the pain of that adopted child into the family they are chosen by. Perhaps this is where our version of adoption has something to say to Paul’s analogy. When God invites us in as adopted children to his family he, too, willingly takes on the pain of our previous lives and carries it for us. He willingly gets involved in all our brokenness and lovingly gives us space to become who we were always meant to be.

Part of the pain of adoption is when the damage done to that child has rendered them unable to receive the love they so obviously deserve. It is as though that place where love gets in is broken – sometimes beyond compare.

For us, if we are to really live in the reality of the life offered to us in the Spirit, we need to be able to receive that love and family.

Maybe that is where this passage gets difficult for us. We can all believe that this offer of being a child in this perfect family is available to others, but is it really available to me? This can be hard to accept – especially when we have to take a lot of this on trust. Like creation, we are waiting for all these things to become obvious and to fulfilment and so what we are left with is …

The Hope We Hang on to

Hope can be difficult. Hope can be exhausting. If we are facing struggles and difficulties, sometime hope is more than we can manage. But Paul tells us to live in this state of hope for things that we can barely imagine. The writer to the Hebrews reminds us that God’s people had been living in a state of hope for centuries; the catalogue of heroes of faith ends with these words…

¹³ All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth. ¹⁴ People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. ¹⁵ If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. ¹⁶ Instead, they were longing for a better country – a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.

Hebrews 11: 13–16 NIV®

This living in expectation, hanging on to the hope of God’s amazing work coming to fruition, is not a vague optimistic whistling-in-the-dark sort of existence. Rather it is a daily decision to hang on to the hope that has been promised because we have seen enough glimpses of what is in store.

It may feel like a bit of a stretch at times, but life in the church is meant to be that foretaste of what is waiting for us. I can understand that you may not get that excited about that if you think it is going to be one long coffee after the service and a list of rotas! But if we look round at each other and realise that this community of completely different people, often with nothing in common except our love for Jesus, is a small taster of what is to come, we can get a glimpse of the glory God is preparing for us.

Hope is hard, but Jesus calls us to live out that prophetic hope for a world that has given in to cynicism. We have a different song to sing and story to tell because we are adopted children of God with our hearts set on hope. We can sing that song because we are loved and accepted now and are no longer bound by the things that made us less than we were created to be.

So, as we go into the world this week, we go as children of God and heirs of the kingdom! We go as people of hope who can live sacrificial lives here and now because of the promise of things to come.

Prayer

Amen