MAY 30 – SHARE

5/30 Romans 8:17-27
17 And since we are his children, we will share his treasures — for everything God gives to his Son, Christ, is ours, too. But if we are to share his glory, we must also share his suffering. 18 Yet what we suffer now is nothing compared to the glory he will give us later. 19 For all creation is waiting eagerly for that future day when God will reveal who his children really are. 20 Against its will, everything on earth was subjected to God’s curse. 21 All creation anticipates the day when it will join God’s children in glorious freedom from death and decay. 22 For we know that all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. 23 And even we Christians, although we have the Holy Spirit within us as a foretaste of future glory, also groan to be released from pain and suffering. We, too, wait anxiously for that day when God will give us our full rights as his children, including the new bodies he has promised us. 24 Now that we are saved, we eagerly look forward to this freedom. For if you already have something, you don’t need to hope for it. 25 But if we look forward to something we don’t have yet, we must wait patiently and confidently. 26 And the Holy Spirit helps us in our distress. For we don’t even know what we should pray for, nor how we should pray. But the Holy Spirit prays for us with groanings that cannot be expressed in words. 27 And the Father who knows all hearts knows what the Spirit is saying, for the Spirit pleads for us believers in harmony with God’s own will.
SHARE
I suspect that you like me often struggle with the idea of our sharing in Christ’s glorious freedom right now. Oh we think about heaven and when things are going right we speak confidently but what about when things go terribly wrong what then? We share this moment all Christ’s riches. We can only imagine in the most primitive way what this will mean but we know that it is significant. We share in all of His glory and riches and consequently in His suffering for the world hates Jesus. The fact that we share in His sufferings and can see and experience that should encourage us to more strongly believe in the sharing in His riches that will one day be ours. Rejoice for we belong to the King of Glory and will benefit from His glorious riches from now into eternity.