Romans 8:12-17

A new month, a new series: We Are Family.  And a new passage to explore, chew on, and digest: Romans 8:12-17.

Scripture is a family saga, the family story from which each of our family stories derives.  God designed creation for human habitation, but a habitation ordered around family, around life together in families.  It wasn’t good for first man Adam to be alone, so God created first woman Eve, that they together might have children and fill the earth.  But human sin strikes at the heart of God’s intention, as Adam blames Eve for their joint disobedience, Eve blames the serpent, fingers pointing in every direction except the one right direction.  Their firstborn son Cain murders his brother, and the family drama has continued ever since.

When God launches his recovery project, he promises to make Abraham “the father of many nations.” “Father” is family language.  But not a family restricted to just one family or clan, not just one tribe or nation.  God tells Abraham that his intention is to bless “all the nations of the earth” through Abraham and his offspring (more family language).

Jesus spoke often of the God who is “my Father” and taught us to pray to “Our Father in heaven.”  Jesus also identified himself as God’s unique, one-and-only Son, and Paul constantly addresses the Christians to whom he wrote his letters as “brothers and sisters” in Christ (family language through and through).

God thinks about “family” differently than we do!  For us, “family” is defined by DNA, birth, human parentage, and the wider associations of “relatives”: grandparents, uncles and aunts, nephews, nieces and cousins.

And a lot of other things get mixed in as well: race and ethnicity, birthplace and homeland, “family history,” and the many ways in which that history is full of intra-family and inter-family conflicts.

As we work our way through Romans 8, Paul shows us that the one family God is fashioning is first and foremost in Christ, not in DNA or human parentage or “blood ties.”  Second, and this is what Paul focuses on in this week’s passage, God’s family lives and works in and according to the Spirit of God.  “Family” carries mutual and reciprocal obligation, so Paul begins our passage by affirming that, in Christ’s family, “we have an obligation” to one another.  That obligation is to live in, through, and by the Spirit of God, instead of living in our old patterns of sin and selfishness.

This “spiritual” family is deeply practical!  Life in God’s Spirit requires us to “put to death” our self-centered, self-oriented ways of behaving and, instead, to be led by God’s Spirit.  How can we recognize the children of God?  Everyone who is led by the Spirit of God is a child of God.  That Spirit leads us to Jesus and teaches us to follow Jesus; that Spirit is constantly reorienting and recalibrating us to Christ and his kingdom; that Spirit produces the fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness and all the rest (Galatians 5:19 ff.).

In God’s family, genetics doesn’t matter; neither does skin color, ethnic or national identity, marital status, social location, economic status, political affiliation, or all the other factors that we can allow to divide and separate our human families.

We are family? In Christ: we are family!

There are no perfect families!  How would you like to pray for our church to grow together as a family-in-Christ?